According to my research, there are much more interesting and poetic ways of understanding the process of reproduction, vs the scientific story of oocytes and blastocysts and Gonadotropin-releasing hormone and terms that isolate, subdivide, and have nothing to do with how it feels to make babies. Some tribal South Africans understood that conception occurs if a woman lies down in the rain, allowing the seeds inside her body to be germinated, just like those in the land.
A Nepalese way of understanding the creation of life is that the souls of those who have died in the past 40 days visit with couples who are making love, slipping into the woman’s body during intercourse. It is the “buttermilk”, or semen, that creates the baby’s bones, and the mother’s menstrual blood that forms the baby’s body.
In Malaysia, the fetal spirit is conceived in the father’s brain and heart, where it learns first of the world through the father’s perspective. The spirit then enters its mother in the father’s semen during intercourse.
For the Trobriand Islanders, whose culture is entwined with the sea, the souls of babies float in seaweed and attach themselves to women as they swim in the ocean.
