https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3519057/

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I've heard of fetuses growing outside the uterus before (generally due to a ruptured ectopic pregnancy), and while in most cases the fertilized egg will just get absorbed back into the body, sometimes that little fucker can survive and it can implant itself anywhere it feels like, including the abdominal wall and even other organs.

In the case of this study, which looks at two separate cases of hepatic pregnancy, the fetus attached itself to the woman's liver. The first case involved surgical removal of the fetus at 18 weeks because in cases of extrauterine pregnancy, it's not considered viable and is treated more like an abnormal growth than a "happy accident." In the second case, the pregnancy was discovered at 18 weeks, but was allowed to continue until 34 weeks because reasons. Both women died from hemorrhaging or complications caused by hemorrhaging in spite of the doctors' best efforts to stop the bleeding after the clumpectomy.

Stuff of fucking nightmares right there. I'm sure a lot of people would say that this kind of a thing is a miracle and "life finds a way," but it sounds like the survival rate of this particular problem is pretty goddamn low. As if ectopic pregnancies weren't bad enough, imagine surviving a ruptured one only to learn that the clump grabbed hold of an actually vital organ instead. Thankfully, this is a pretty damn rare complication of tubal pregnancy (1.4% of all ectopic pregnancies turn into hepatic pregnancies). Unfortunately, since it's a rare complication, it also means doctors may not know exactly how to deal with it and it means you're gonna be more of a guinea pig than a patient if you've got a fetus sucking on your liver.

Ever since reading the article "the war in the womb" none of this surprises me. One of the of the things I remember mentioned in the article was that they tried implanting embryos in mice in places other than the uterus, expecting them to die, but instead they thrived, hijacking resources to the detriment of the host.

Yikes, that's some scary shit! I read more into non-uterine pregnancies after seeing this study and from what I could gather, this condition is so dangerous to the host because it's so hard to remove the placenta from whatever organ the fetus chooses to latch onto without causing fatal hemorrhaging. Seems just about all women who have an extrauterine pregnancy wind up losing tons of blood and come very, very close to losing their lives when the fetus is extracted (whether or not it's viable) or they actually do die because nobody can stop the bleeding. Makes sense, the placenta is very vascular and if any sort of growth in the body is too vascular, it's often considered inoperable because of the risk that removal presents.

Seems like the uterus serves as sort of its own immune system within the body when pregnancy occurs and protects the mother/host from being killed by the greedy fetus that would suck her dry otherwise. Must be kinda like how the stomach has its own protective inner barrier to keep all that nasty bacteria and acid contained because it would cause big problems if it were to escape into the rest of the body.