mielikkishunt wrote:
Shifting is painful, and stressful, and it's a known fact that stress can causae people to abort their unborn baby. A lady at work had to quit work because of the stress, they were afraid she'd lose yet another baby.
For one thing, shifting is only painful and stressful in some people's scenarios. It depends on how you build your own personal vision of werewolves. For another thing, pain and stress experienced by the mother do not necessarily translate to an increased chance for miscarraige, it depends on the toughness of the mother. There are women who live in abusive marraiges where they get beaten badly on a regular basis, yet still manage to pop out 5 or 6 healthy kids. And I imagine that most of us would envision werewolves as particularly tough women, especially if they have regeneration powers.
mielikkishunt wrote:
The adrenalin wracking the mother's body can't be good on the fetus, the body forms are totally different. Woman are wider in the hip area(where we carry babies) than a lupine is. And carrying that baby without the cradle of the pelvis is goign to be extremely painful to a wolves abdomen.
Not necessarily. For one thing, the total weight of fetus(es) plus womb is similar, and so is the total volume. It is true that wolves are much narrower in the waist area, but a lot of this is due to less intestines (as true carnivores, wolves don't need great masses of intestines in order to fully digest food, like us omnivores do), other organs that are smaller or differently located, and different muscle/bone structures that leads to a different shape of that body space.
As far as needing a pelvis
underneath the womb in order to carry a few extra pounds, having a pelvis underlying the body's organs is a freak of human biology, due to our bipedal nature. If it would be so painful to carry 5-7 extra pounds, plus some more weight of fluids and an enlarged womb, without a bone underneath it, then how do pregnant cows manage it? A cow fetus weighs a heck of a lot more than any human unborn or any litter of unborn wolf pups.
As an example of how things are situated inside the body, any doctor will tell you that some people have certain organs (such as the liver especially) that are much larger (or much smaller) than those in other people, or even differently shaped. Yet our external torsos look much the same. This is because, except in the most extreme cases, the body finds a way to fit organs that are larger than usual among the other organs. I would tend to imagine that any process capable of changing a human into a wolf would have a sophisticated way of dealing with the problem of how to arrange the internal organs.
In addition, animals seem to be designed to handle pregnancies better than humans. Having grown up on a farm, I've sometimes seen animals give birth to surprisingly large babies (or a surprisingly large number of smaller babies) when they didn't even look pregnant. Even when they did look pregnant, often they only looked a bit that way, and didn't start looking that way until a week, or a few days, before birth (one of our horses, a Welsh pony, was very much like this; she would always not look pregnant until about four days before birth).
If these qualities tranferred over to pregnant female werewolves, I might expect them to be unusually agile and non-emcumbered when in gestalt form or wolf form (until the last week or two, anyway) and they might not appear to be pregnant in these forms until the 9th month or so.