Awww, look at the adorable parasitic foreign organism sucking the life out of you.

Slate Magazine just published this piece that would be hilarious if it were meant as satire. Sadly, it's not.

Rebecca Helm, a PhD candidate at Brown University thank you very much, acknowledges Mothers Day by apologizing to her for forming in her womb. She calls it "probably the worst thing I’ve ever done to my mother." C'mon, I'd bet the bills during all those years of Ivy League education was much worse than just nine months in her womb.

Or maybe the embarrassment of your child writing for Slate Magazine may be worse.

It all started when I was a zygote. I was floating through your uterus when I bumped into your uterine wall. I’m not proud of what I did next, but I really wasn’t thinking. (That’s not an excuse—I was just a clump of cells.) I used my outer layer of cells to invade and destroy parts of your uterus. This outer layer consisted of my trophoblast cells, and I used them like a horde of ravenous snakes: winding through your uterine wall, killing your cells, and sucking up your nutrients. With my trophoblasts I burrowed into your uterine wall like a parasite until I was completely embedded in your tissue.

Then I went a little psycho on you. In good embryo fashion, my trophoblasts grew into clumps that fused with your blood vessels...

Just when you thought I couldn't get any more demanding, I started actively invading your blood supply. This is where humans are especially destructive. No other animal is so ruthless in its invasion. For most animal species, Mom’s blood vessels remain safely hers, but humans are not like most animals. My cells began surrounding the arteries you used to fill my placenta with blood. These arteries provided your blood to the chambers of my placenta, and thus provided me with much-needed oxygen and nutrients. Slowly my cells began to replace your artery walls, effectively taking your placental arteries under my control. Once I had control of your arteries, I widened them to increase the amount of blood that entered the blood chambers, which increased the amount of oxygen and nutrients passing through my placenta (and thus to me). But that was just small-scale control—I wasn’t done yet.
 
This is where I feel really bad. This is where things get dangerous. My placenta started secreting hormones that lowered your blood pressure and increased your blood sugar. At the least, this probably made you lightheaded. At worst, this could have killed us both.

A rather dim view of humanity. But hey, at least it makes a connection between the parasitical invasion of a zygote and Mother's Day. Hey, maybe this is progress.

But remember, next time a woman shows you an ultrasound you should say, "Awww, look at the adorable parasitic foreign organism sucking the life out of you. Totes adorbs." That's the preferred nomenclature nowadays.