"...to remove the baby via, what, surgery? Do they not emerge on their own if you wait?"

"On one occasion, experimentally, some people tried waiting to see if the baby ever came out on its own and it did after nine months and the mother died. Understandably people haven't tried that again."

"...childbirth does sometimes kill humans, who have nine-month pregnancies, but not usually, even without good medical care. Also I'd expect C-sections - that's what we call surgical baby removal - to be dangerous without good medical care too..."

"I don't know much about what went wrong. It could've been a statistically unlikely mischance. But also, nine months slow is much much longer to wait for a partner than three months slow so without any discernible benefits..."

"So, a human baby born three months along pretty much does not survive, I think they maybe don't even have lungs yet, so something different is going on, but in humans there's an inflection point around twenty-three to twenty-four weeks where they get much more viable. The closer they get to the full nine months the better, by and large, but that's where it starts getting much easier to make sure a premature human baby doesn't outright die. Also you can pick them up and carry them around then as long as all their medical accessories are the portable kind."

"Usually once you've extracted the baby you walk it to somewhere cozy and get it all swaddled up in magic cloth and in a good safe location then you speed up and go about your life and feed it regularly. It'll speed up on its own gradually. If you instead want to stay slow you still wouldn't want to carry it around, though, they're very fragile at that stage."

"Maybe the magic cloth is doing a whole hell of a lot of work here."

"I think if you have other cloths you just have to change them regularly, which is hard around a slow baby."

"Oooooor they're glorified diapers."

"Maybe one of these courts will have a baby in progress you can take a look at."

"Maybe. If they're not people do they accumulate debt?"

"No. Debt can only apply to people."

"So at least they wouldn't accumulate problems from receiving the service of more parental investment."

"Parentdebts are overwhelming in size anyway, it wouldn't change much if they were a little bigger. It'd be a move in the wrong direction but not a significant one."

"...why are parentdebts overwhelming, if they don't start out counting?"

"Once they become a person they start out with parentdebts. They're for the act of creation, with the motherdebt accordingly much bigger than the fatherdebt; they don't vary by how much parental investment there was."

"That seems... weird... but okay."

"I have mixed feelings about parentdebts because they seem in some sense unreasonable but also I think existence is mostly very valuable to people so it makes sense for that to be incentivized and rewarded."

"I mean, the weird thing to me is that they're coming in retroactively for something that happened while the entity was not considered a debt-qualified agent."

"Most people think of them as being present when you start existing, rather than happening retroactively."

"I guess."

"I think you could make parentdebts smaller and still have people have children, but probably not small enough to not define the course of your early life."

"Do I need to be planning to buy everyone's children out and designing a curriculum on how once your baby has skin you need to hold them... I should reserve judgment till I have looked at a faery baby."

"Once babies are fast it won't be hard to convince people to hold them more."

"Maybe that'll help. You've evidently muddled along as a civilization while making like marsupials in the premature baby department but yiiiiikes."