Ben: You Brought This On Yourself

Yes, I know everyone in the blog-o-sphere is abuzz after so many revelations in "Jughead," and I have discussed a few, but today I would like to turn your attention back to another mystery -- why pregnant women on the island die.

A big clue to this mystery was released in the Pierre Chang video shown at ComicCon 2008. If you haven't seen it, run don't walk, here. In the video, Pierre Chang, whom we have previously seen as Dr. Marvin Candle, is seen with his arm (in some of the orientation films it is missing) and with a baby crying in the background. So the Dharma hippies had no problems making love not war and carrying their babies to term as late as 1979.

Some have speculated that the h-bomb had something to do with women dying during pregnancy. I think not -- because, as I speculated in my last post, the h-bomb is buried in concrete deep under the Swan station, and has been since the 50s.

Why would the Dharma Initiative build a station directly over an h-bomb? I'm guessing they didn't know what it was, and just found a huge block of concrete with "unique electromagnetic fluctuations" and assumed it was one of the island's "mysterious properties" that needed studying. And it's probably this Mr. Magoo "what does this button do?" attitude of Dharma's that ticked off Richard Alpert's original Others and forced them to kill everyone (like they killed the army men who violated the island in '54). Even 24 years later, poor Jacob is so wounded by Dharma's experiments that he begs anyone who'll listen to "help me."

But I digress. Others (not those Others, I mean other bloggers) have speculated that "the incident" is what caused the pregnancy problems to manifest. I don't think so there either. The incident I'm placing at 1979-1980, and I believe it's the cause of Dr. Chang's lost arm (unless the arm just wandered off into the jungle and is living with Jacob, like Claire), and we know it's the reason the numbers had to be entered in the computer. Isn't that enough to follow from one incident. They wouldn't add pregnancy problems on top of all that.

So now for why we're here. The actual cause of the pregnancy problems. We know that things from people's past can manifest on the island -- like Kate's horse. I think not just important things, but also important events can manifest. Ben's mother dying in childbirth affected his life more than any other event. Kate is small time to the island, so her horse only manifests twice and shows itself to her and Sawyer. Ben, however, has spent most of his life on the island and is its leader and protector, so this important event for him manifests in every woman on the island. His big event keeps playing out over and over again.

Ben brought Juliet to the island to solve this problem -- but he was always the cause. To solve the problem, he would have to abdicate as leader. Which he finally did by turning the frozen donkey wheel and leaving forever. My guess is, women can have children again now that he's gone. But with Locke as leader, they will probably all have kidney failure.