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That depends. Look it up. You will find there is a point where it switches. Normally the body (of both baby and mother) will protect the mother. Something goes wrong or just gets too far "out of spec"? Miscarriage. After a few months, the body goes so far as to sedate the mother and child before terminating the pregnancy. There is research claiming it actually shuts down the baby's nervous system before decoupling.

But about a month before birth things switch around. The womb partially disconnects from control systems of the mother's body and ... there's an extremely scary way of pointing this out I once heard from a medical professor: "you know just about the only thing a human body can still do when it's decapitated? It can give birth"

In less extreme circumstances, you actually have a switch in your circulatory system ... when pregnancy gets to this point and the mother's body loses power, it will initiate a rapid birthing process, and start shutting down organ after organ to give birth with the remaining power. That includes, eventually, the brain. Only the heart, lungs, liver and womb will remain operational. The body will shut down blood flow to the brain to continue giving birth. Once shut down it cannot be turned back on. So this kills the mother, despite the body remaining functional, in some reported cases, for over an hour, and is something gynaecologists get trained to prevent from happening.

Given how common it was even a century ago for women to die giving birth, one wonders how often this mechanism was involved.

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andai 4 days ago | parent [-]

Ah, a bit of light bedtime reading... I should really turn off my phone before going to bed.

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klipt 4 days ago | parent [-]

No sources provided and internet failed to confirm ... closest I found was

> In extremely rare forensic cases, a phenomenon called "coffin birth" (post-mortem fetal extrusion) can occur, where gases from decomposition expel a fetus from the deceased mother's body. This is not true childbirth and is extremely rare, occurring only under specific post-mortem conditions.

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spwa4 3 days ago | parent [-]

Oh come on, any medical text will confirm that the womb has it's own nervous system and blood supply and a good text will tell you that the system will function correctly in even completely paralyzed women. Just how do you think that works? And any text will SCREAM at you to keep a constant eye on the woman giving birth: if they stop breathing IT WILL NOT stop the birth, rather it will cause severe symptoms afterwards. A gynaecologist is not telling women to breathe to calm them down.

The blood supply and nerves are weird special cases in a great many ways. For instance, they're not left-right symmetric (whereas the ones of "nearby" systems, like the bladder, are. So this was not done because there's only one womb)

	▲	serf 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		>a good text will tell you that the system will function correctly in even completely paralyzed women. Just how do you think that works? the body has a lot of messaging systems; 'completely paralyzed' people still enjoy the use of many chemical messaging signals; they just generally have a hindered spinal cord or neurological interface element. A paralyzed person will still go into shock after a dismemberment, blood-flow will be affected by vaso-constriction, and so on. It doesn't surprise me to hear that childbirth can trigger a similar set of conditions to occur. And that belittles the existence of the underlying support nervous system and the secondary elements. Many completely paralyzed men can achieve erection and ejaculation even with a near total disconnect from the rest of the nervous system. Why? The parasympathetic nervous system and secondary nervous materials in the region in question are taking up the slack from the brain and still allowing 'normal' function.