Success from this point is by no means assured. Perhaps as many as half of all conceptions are lost without being noticed. Without this, the rate of birth defects would be 12 percent instead of 2 percent. About 1 percent of implanted eggs end up stuck in the Fallopian tube, or somewhere else other than the womb, in what is known as an ectopic pregnancy (from a Greek word meaning “wrong place”). This can be very dangerous even now. Once it was a death sentence.
