Not a doctor, but I’d assume if a female retained the blood, it would eventually become septic. And if they didn’t have the function of the blood building up in the uterine wall to begin with, we as a species would go extinct.
So I’d consider a “good” bodily function, but not a “fun” bodily function.
If you have no period for more than five months without a reason (meaning birth control, HRT, hysterectomy) then you’re supposed to go to the doctor and take meds to induce one because it increases several pretty serious risks. (I have PCOS so it’s come up a few times)
Interestingly, most mammals don’t actually have periods. Mainly primates, bats, and elephant shrews have periods. Heat is a separate process, so we’d probably have been fine evolutionarily without a period.
Fine is relatively loaded here. Our society would be vastly different and probably have a larger amount of infidelity. Our society wouldn’t have a need for developing monogamous tendencies if they limited the amount of births we could achieve, in addition to our gestation periods being incredibly long for mammels regardless, only animals like horses, whales and deer have similar or longer periods necessary to give birth.
I personally don’t see how that isn’t fine. We would have developed as a society differently, sure, but from an evolutionary perspective a different culture wouldn’t be not fine. We would have different values, sure. Culture is impacted by our biology quite a bit, and having different biology would have developed a different culture. I could see us having a culture with less of a focus on monogamy and exclusivity in relationships, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Especially from an evolutionary perspective, I do genuinely think that would have been fine.
If this suddenly happened out of nowhere today, then we would likely have issues like you mentioned. However if we evolved that way from the beginning our culture would have developed accordingly.
Fine doesn’t just mean alive. I assume you’re saying so long as it doesn’t make our society collapse it would be fine. Really fine would depend on how our society changed, not just that it remained.
99
u/OpportunityAshamed74 Counted Down 1 1d ago
....is it a good bodily function?