Back to the Womb

"So many mortals wish to return to the womb, but you're the only one I know who's managed to do it!"

— Darklord Varvara, Nekropolis

When it comes to physical regression and similar fantastical conditions, it always seems to stop at infancy: even in the event of a Death by De-aging, it usually just results in the victim vanishing out of existence and rarely delves into the biological implications — unless, of course, the story feels like getting into Body Horror. The same goes for other fantastical means of regaining youth, for even characters blessed with Born-Again Immortality tend to regain awareness at the moment of birth and no earlier.

However, a rare few get to experience a return to the very earliest stages of their existence: the womb itself.

This can be due to an overly-powerful case of the Fountain of Youth, Merlin Sickness taken to its logical conclusion, the aforementioned Born-Again Immortality, Mental Time Travel, or to something weirder; whatever the case, the character finds themselves back in their mother's womb, most commonly during the third trimester.

For good measure, it's very common for characters in this situation to be fully conscious and somehow still able to think on an adult level, the better to narrate their experiences. Of course, being able to understand the situation is one thing; how they react to being sent back to the womb and literally being reborn is another matter entirely...

May overlap with And Your Reward Is Infancy. Also, despite the title, this doesn't often overlap with the Womb Level.

Compare Baby Morph Episode. Contrast the aforementioned Death by De-aging, the lethal version of this trope.

---

Examples

Advertising

• In this 2011 advert for Steri Stumpie, a 10-year-old kid claims that if a mother and son drink Steri Stumpie at the same time, they'll both get ten years younger. He and his mum then both take a healthy swig of their respective bottles of Steri Stumpie. One cut later, the mother is not only ten years younger, but she's also alone in the room and nine months pregnant.

Comic Books

• Fantastic Four: In one truly bizarre instance, this may have happened to Valeria Richards twice.
  • First of all, she was conceived in the Negative Zone, which had dangerous consequences for both mother and child, and despite the best effort of Reed and all the scientists he consulted, Valeria appeared to be stillborn. Instead, her older brother, mini Reality Warper Franklin Richards, subconsciously transported her to a parallel universe (it helped that he got a nudge from Roma, then Guardian of the Omniverse), and grew up there as the daughter of Sue and a good Victor von Doom.
  • As the wiki notes, it is unclear whether the alternate Sue received her as a newborn, or if she gave birth to her herself. It then gets still weirder - after a time jump, Valeria von Doom a.k.a. Marvel Girl as she referred to herself, spent some time hanging around with the FF and got to know her mother, revealing significant reality bending powers of her own. After a crisis involving Abraxas (a cosmic horror that Galactus normally kept in check), her and Franklin expended their powers resurrecting Galactus, something that left him depowered and reverted her to an unborn child in Sue's womb, where with the aid of Victor von Doom, she was later born as the 616 version of Valeria Richards. Again.
• House and Powers of X: Moira McTaggart is revealed to have the mutant power to reboot the universe every time she dies, essentially granting her Born-Again Immortality via "Groundhog Day" Loop. She retains her intelligence and memories when she starts the next life — always doing so in the womb; for good measure, the final panel of the flashback that reveals this features baby Moira beginning her tenth life by opening her eyes in the womb with an expression that can only be described as "Here We Go Again!". Her internal narration notes that the experience itself is quite comforting, though the "Groundhog Day" Loop puts a strain on her sanity from the start of her second life (turns out that a Reincarnation Romance doesn't work out so well when you know everything about someone, good and bad, from the start).
• New X-Men: Cassandra Nova uses the machine Cerebra to swap bodies with her twin brother, Charles Xavier, leaving him trapped in a hellish mental landscape. To save him, Jean Grey conducts a telepathic rescue, triggering a vision in which she sees Cassandra being conceived and trying to murder Charles while the two are still inside the womb. This prompts her brother to retaliate with a psychic attack, causing Nova to be born as a chaotic mass of cells. After the vision is over, Jean finds Xavier crying while clasping his hypertrophied encephalon, which implies he had been reliving that horrific memory.
• MAD had a Just Below the Surface comic where an alcoholic father begs the Tooth Fairy coming over to take his child's lost tooth to undo his existence by wishing he was never born. After the Tooth Fairy agrees to granting the man's wish, the comic ends with the man still in his elderly mother's womb as a full-grown adult, confused about the circumstances while his mother sighs in despair over being pregnant for decades without ever giving birth.

Comic Strips

• Jump Start (Robb Armstrong): Teddy and Tommi sometimes imagine or dream of themselves in the womb together. It is implicit Twin Telepathy, as in this Shared Dream they can talk privately.
• In Liō, the main character uses a time machine to send himself back to the beginning — only to find himself in the womb again. It's that kind of comic strip.
• There is a Joan Cornella cartoon where a newborn baby decides to go back into the womb after seeing that Donald Trump is President.

Fan Works

• Assassin's Creed II Peggy Sue fanfic Assassin's Creed Repeat begins with Ezio dying and finding himself back in the womb at the start of his life, before being born and essentially re-enacting the introductory scenes of the original game.
• Better to Reign in Heaven: After catching Mattie in the act of trying to use the Chinese Invasion Failsafe, Stanislaus Braun uses his Virtual-Reality Warper powers to regress him to a fetus. Then, since Tessa Dithers helped Mattie, he makes sure that Tessa ends up pregnant with the infant Lone Wanderer... and out of sheer sadism, he makes the labor as difficult and painful as possible: not only does he seal her inside her house away from anyone who could help, but gives her only the crudest, rustiest instruments to help with the birth. As a result, both Mattie and Tessa die multiple times over the course of the week-long torture, Braun rewinding them back to the start of the torment after every death. Oh, and Mattie is fully conscious of his plight in the womb until Tessa finally manages to beat the odds and safely deliver the baby.
• In the Harry Potter fanfic Reborn To A Mother's Womb, the immortal Safira always begins her newest life by awakening in her latest mother's womb. For good measure, after 14 consecutive lives, she has enough experience to avoid causing her new mother any discomfort; she even occasionally taps out messages in morse code.
• Another Harry Potter fanfic, What He Never Had, begins with Harry being unexpectedly being flung backward in time and finding himself in his mother's womb. Not only is he fully conscious of his new state of being, but he even ends up speaking to his mum when he accidentally tunes in on a telepathic conversation between her and Dumbledore. Once he's born, it at first looks as if Harry's going to be allowed to relive his life as it was... up until unexpected events begin throwing the timeline off-course.

Film — Live-Action

• In the director's cut of The Butterfly Effect, it's revealed that Evan's Mental Time Travel powers can take him all the way back to the womb once he has some footage of that time. In the ending, with his power about to break down from cumulative brain damage, Evan enacts a last-ditch attempt to change history for the better by travelling back to before he was born and strangling himself with his own umbilical cord.
• In Infinite, most of the eponymous immortals regain awareness of their past lives during childhood, and usually over the course of several years. However, Bathurst regains full awareness in the womb, all at once, effectively leaving him trapped in solitary confinement for months on end until he's finally born. Needless to say, going through this claustrophobic nightmare every time he dies has left Bathurst more than a little bit unhinged, hence why he's so desperate to end the cycle of reincarnation once and for all — via wiping out all life on Earth.
• Played for horror in The Suckling: After finishing its killing spree at the brothel, the fetus-monster shrinks back down into its mother's womb and apparently goes back to being an ordinary fetus... only for the ending to reveal that it's fully capable of going on the attack again, as a couple of rapist orderlies learn the hard way.

Literature

• In Traci Harding's The Ancient Future Trilogy, the immortal wizard Taliesin features the same origin story as his mythological counterpart (see below), including Gwion Bach becoming Keridwen's unborn child and spending the next few months being remade in her womb before being reborn as Taliesin. With Taliesin himself having recounted this in the original novel, the event is actually depicted in its entirety in This Present Past, complete with the revelation that, thanks to supernatural restrictions, Keridwen's pregnancy took 23 years to reach full term.
• Back Into Mommy's Tummy: In this Children's Picture Book, the 5-year-old protagonist wishes for this. She imagines a childlike Fantasy Sequence about having fun in Mommy's tummy, which is not realistic but instead follows the Rule of Cute. Mommy plays along, but gently warns that the little girl could not do her favorite things. Importantly, the mother understands this fantasy is really about Infant Sibling Jealousy — there is already a baby in mommy's tummy, and the sister-to-be worries it gets all the love and attention, so she wants to be there instead. Reassurance, Feeling the Baby Kick, and a reminder that it will soon be out of Mommy's tummy encourage her.
  "If I'm in your tummy, I'll never have to get up early for school again. And you'll think about me all day long."
  "I already think about you all day long" says Mommy.
  "Yes, but you'll think of me even more if I'm in your tummy."
• The Bone Clocks: Immortals have the power to psychically "ingress" into the bodies of others, usually for the sake of controlling their actions or learning their secrets. However, during her first meeting with Marinus, Esther Little briefly uses this ability to settle a paternity suit by transmitting her mind into the body of an unborn child so she can perform a psychoteric DNA scan.
• Fate/Apocrypha: Assassin of Black, better known as Jack the Ripper, is the Anthropomorphic Personification of the despair and hatred of the thousands of aborted and unwanted children of Victorian London. She attempts to return to the warmth of her mother's womb by approaching women and butchering them, then trying to crawl inside them. When the dead woman's body inevitably goes cold, she leaves in search of her next "mother" to embrace.
• In the JG Ballard short story "Mr. F Is Mr. F", Charles Freeman is celebrating the unexpected pregnancy of his wife Elizabeth when he finds himself inexplicably becoming younger. The more the pregnancy progresses, the younger Charles gets, until he finally realizes that the baby that Elizabeth's about to give birth to is him; soon after, after numerous failed escape attempts, he regresses to the nadir of infancy and is absorbed into Elizabeth's womb. Overlaps with Death by De-aging, as Elizabeth then allows Charles to continue to regress until her pregnancy simply reverses itself out of existence.
• Late in Nekropolis, Matt Richter offhandedly mentions that he was once hired to help a pregnant witch escape from her abusive husband, and during the pursuit, said husband ended up swapping Matt's mind with that of his client's unborn child, presumably in an attempt to slow them down. He doesn't reveal how this incident was resolved, but Varvara gets a kick out of the story.
• Repeat: The action kicks off with down-and-out author Brad Cohen being given a potion to cure his depression by his wife and going to bed — only to wake up in his mother's womb. After being born again, he proceeds to redo his life from scratch, seizing all the opportunities he missed the first time around and making a success of himself... only for him to vanish out of existence on the night before his fortieth birthday and wake up in the womb, ready to start the "Groundhog Day" Loop all over again.
• Slade House: In the finale of the novel, Slade House finally breaks down after Marinus denies it the infusion of souls that might have saved it, resulting in Norah Grayer rapidly aging to death. However, determined to live and get revenge, Norah sends her soul into the womb of a pregnant woman, rehousing herself in the unborn fetus. As the novel ends immediately afterwards, it's never made clear if she'll be able to retain her adult intellect and memories, or even if she'll ever be able to take revenge on Marinus. Either way, it's clear that Norah has cheated death for the second time.
• Young Wizards: The Wizard's Dilemma provides an odd variant. Nita enters her mother Betty's body (or at least a metaphysical representation of it) with magic in an attempt to destroy the cancer cells that are killing her. Later, Betty herself manifests in the space, and Nita is suddenly struck with a strangely familiar sensation—the feeling of being one with the entire world. She realizes that she's essentially returned to the womb and is connecting with her mother on the purest level possible.

Live-Action TV

• Doctor Who: At the end of "Boom Town", Blon Fel-Fotch Passameer-Day Slitheen, who's pulled a Kill and Replace on a politician named Margaret Blaine, ends up looking directly into the Heart of the TARDIS. This action regresses Blon back into an egg, which the Ninth Doctor brings back to Raxacoricofallapatorius to be given to a non-criminal family. Expanded universe materials reveal that being raised correctly leads to Margaret becoming a genuinely brave hero.
• Star Trek: Voyager: Exaggerated. In "Before And After", Kes keeps bouncing backward and forwards in time to different points in her life due to exposure to chroniton particles, eventually going back to being a baby, then a fetus in the womb, and then a zygote before she finally stops time-travelling.

Mythology & Religion

• In Celtic Mythology, lowly servant Gwion Bach was assigned to help the goddess Ceridwen brew a potion of wisdom and inspiration for her son — only to end up accidentally imbibing it himself, ruining the rest of the potion and immediately earning his boss's wrath. He tried to use the knowledge he gained to flee in various shapes, only for Ceridwen to counter all of them, forcing him to hide as a single grain of wheat in a pile of the stuff; Ceridwen just transformed into a hen and ate the whole thing, Gwion included... and somehow ended up becoming pregnant because of this. Nine months later, Gwion was reborn as Ceridwen's son, his magical inspiration allowing him to eventually become the bard and prophet Taliesin.

Webcomics

• Played for Laughs in the Oglaf comic "Snakebite". Orpheus travels to The Underworld to rescue his wife Eurydice, but his mother's ghost accuses him of not visiting her enough. Then she turns into a giant vagina that sucks him in and causes him to be born again as a baby.
  Orpheus: ...Was I supposed to rescue someone?
• This Isekai Maid is Forming a Union!: In the "Q&A Answered!" chapter, it's revealed that Bridgette and other reincarnators reincarnate this way, but most don't get their past life memories at all at once, and not all of the memories either:
  Whenever Bridgette reincarnates, she gets a "hard reset." She isn't born with her past life memories altogether and is limited by her mental age. There's only so much her mind can process. At first she will have vague memories and say random things about her past lives in ignorance, not knowing their true meaning.
  Getting memories gradually is actually what helps her cope to some extent.
  There have been reincarnators who, by accident, gain adult awareness as babies, and suffer mental breakdowns because they are essentially trapped in a body not consistent with their mental age.

Western Animation

• Family Guy:
  • Referenced in "Chitty Chitty Death Bang": Stewie, perceiving his time in the womb as solitary confinement following a bizarre air force mission, is convinced that he's going to be returned to the womb by the Man In White (in other words, the obstetrician who delivered him) and spends the entire episode paranoid about it. This comes to a head when Meg joins a death cult and Stewie mistakes its white-robed leader for the Man In White; after catching said leader alone in the house, Stewie promptly murders him with a ray gun — accidentally saving Meg's life in the process.
  • Amusingly enough, this starts happening for real in "Yug Ylimaf": Brian's clumsy sabotage of Stewie's time machine causes time itself to begin moving backward, and after an entire episode of shenanigans, Stewie is rewound all the way back to the day of his birth, with his parents forcing him back into his mother's womb. Thankfully, Brian is able to repair the time machine before the expected Death by De-aging follows, allowing Stewie to be reborn — whereupon he remarks that he never realized what a "man cave" he had in Lois's uterus.
• In The Midnight Gospel episode "Mouse Of Silver", the ongoing conversation between Clancy and his mother takes an odd turn when the latter abruptly dies of old age... only for a mushroom to sprout from her body, releasing spores that impregnate Clancy. Seconds later, he reaches a full-term pregnancy and gives birth to his now infant-aged mother — and she's clearly maintained her intellect throughout the whole process, for as soon as the umbilical cord's been cut, she immediately continues the conversation they were just having.
• The Simpsons: Referenced In "The Book Job"; Ralph gets scared by the dinosaurs at an arena show and says, "I want to go back in Mommy!" before trying to go up Sarah's dress.

---