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Do you think shifting is a contreceptive and that if a woman becomes pregnant during shift that zygote will disapear?

where would it go though, the womb is very protective, it keeps almost everything out. But matter can't be created or destroyed, so where would the Zygote go?

There is a period where the zygote isn't that well protected, but once in the Womb, it's safe.
Were's might have a higher than normal likelyhood of ectopic pregnancies.

If they have ectopic pregnancy, then won't they die when they give birth?

Personally, i don't think I'd rely on shifting as a favored method of birth control.

PariahPoet wrote:Personally, i don't think I'd rely on shifting as a favored method of birth control.

Unless you wanted to get rid of a really pushy obnoxious boy-or-girl friend

RedEye wrote: Unless you wanted to get rid of a really pushy obnoxious boy-or-girl friend

Hee hee

Wouldn't, after the fetus has developed some, the physical force of a transformation cause a miscarriage unless some form of magic or medical science were applied to either stop the transformation for the time or to better protect the fetus? Or, if its a phase transformation that involves the concentration of the were, wouldn't the fetus then die since it doesn't know how to control its transformation? Unless that becomes the deepest instinct, probably close to the fight-or-flight instinct.

Mabey during pregnacy the horomones that controll the shift shut off or are diverted toward the bregnancy helping the fetus develop faster

Shifting as contraception certainly has been a helpful plot device for my stories. It's not that the zygote simply vanishes, but rather, the shifting induces a miscarriage, especially if done early on. Pregnancies are a lot more unstable in the first trimester, and nearly half of all of them end in miscarriages--most so early they're mistaken for slightly late periods.

Lycanthropy would increase risk of ectopic pregnancy. Wolves have paired uterine horns designed to carry a litter of cubs, typically two to four on each side. I would imagine a lycanthropic human would retain some of this anatomy; a very rare number of human women have paired uteri rather than a single uterus, but this often can lead to fertility problems, since the human fetus gets comaratively large, a single one near term taking up the entire uterus, distended into most of the abdomen. Having twins is considered automatically a high risk pregnancy, and having more than two children very problematic. (They're nearly always delivered by C-section.) Human childbirth before modern times was inordinately risky compared to what other mammals face, with a distrubingly high mortality rate. Also note that most other mammals don't appear to have quite the same tremendous amount of pain with labor and the delivery process, though there's no way to know, since pain even between humans is subjective, and concepts such as pain and emotion in animals outside of our own species is a notoriously neglected subject.

Though my own werewolves have singleton births with human nine month gestational periods, there's no compelling reason why a lycanthrope shouldn't have a more wolf-like gynecology. (Indeed, having a bipartate uterus goes against having singleton children, though one can explain it by retaining human ovulation cycles, which are one at a time.)

To a werewolf wanting to have children, one would have to abstain from shifting intentionally for at least nine months. (Mine aren't forced to shift on the full moon. I know--that's no fun, because it doesn't screw with their lives. But, rest assured, my werewolves still have their fair share of issues.) Still, it's not a perfect method, any more than is marking the calendar and tracking ovulation days. Still, it's reliable enough that it's several years between the start of the lycanthropy epidemic at the start of 2013 and the first lycanthropic child birth known and witnessed in the modern world. But, once people figure out how to do it, by 2030, there's a generation growing up never having known a time when werewolves were just a legend.

Wouldn't it be hard for a species to evolve when the females misscarried every time they tried to defend themselves (aka when they shift to a more dangerous form)? If the lycanthropy is magical, that wouldn't be a problem however.
I know next to nothing about neither normal human pregnancy nor normal wolf pregnancy, though.

In_Cruce_Salus wrote:Wouldn't it be hard for a species to evolve when the females misscarried every time they tried to defend themselves (aka when they shift to a more dangerous form)?

That was pretty much my argument in an older topic about werewolf babies. Simply put, species that can't reproduce DIE. If they don't want to go extinct a rare species can't afford to not have offspring.

In_Cruce_Salus wrote:Wouldn't it be hard for a species to evolve when the females misscarried every time they tried to defend themselves (aka when they shift to a more dangerous form)? If the lycanthropy is magical, that wouldn't be a problem however.
I know next to nothing about neither normal human pregnancy nor normal wolf pregnancy, though.

this is assuming that werewolves evolved naturally, and wern't the result of human/alien genetic engineering, magic, etc.

Keep in mind that a foetus is tiny until it nears birthing.
Postulate in Were's: Foetus developes normally but does not grow until the last three weeks of gestation. Then, fully formed, it grows to low-normal birth weight over those three weeks. During that time, Shifting is inhibited hormonally.
That would work.

We've had discussions about pregnancy in werewolves before. It was another debate that we never really quite agreed on to the point of nailing down as definition, but the general consensus was that, one way or another, pregnancy among werewolves is higher risk than with normal people. I wouldn't call shifting a contraceptive, but assuming shifting is dangerous to the developing fetus, it could suffice as a sort of do-it-yourself abortion I suppose.

Yeah, I don't know about a contraceptive. Maybe shifting during would... make it more intense?... fun?...pleasurable? Perhaps. ButI don't think shifting would equal abortion either. Since shifting is part of what makes them werewolves and they have to shift every so often to maintain control over their other side. I don't think the moter could last 9-months without shifting.

Lycanthropy can reproduce itself by piggybacking off the human species. That is, werewolves can turn humans into other werewolves. As long as there's a healthy human stock, there's potential future werewolves. It wouldn't matter if werewolves were completely infertile, as long as humans were around.

This is only assuming that lycanthropy can be spread from person to person. It wouldn't work in the "family legacy" type of stories.