Pregnancy

From Conception to Birth
Humans are literally made for love: men’s and women’s bodies are designed for sex, for creating new life. The creation of a new life begins with the mixture of two sets of genes that grow from the meeting of egg and sperm and combine to make a unique human being — which developed from a microscopic bundle of cells into a fully grown human baby ready to be born. Some cells grow to become legs, while others gradually develop into arms, eyes, hair, lungs and brain. Inside the uterus, the baby waits patiently until 40 weeks or 9 months. The mother’s body feeds the baby, filters out harmful substances, and keeps him safe inside a fluid-filled protective sac. Then follows the process of labour and birth, which allows this new baby to emerge from the mother’s body, now able to sustain life alone.

Fertilization and Conception
When a man and woman make love and a man ejaculates, between 40 and 500 million sperm are released. However, most sperm never even enter the woman’s uterus, and only a hundred or so reach the Fallopian tubes within a few hours of sex. The sperm are chemically attracted to the egg and they progress through the uterus stimulated by a substance that makes their tail movements whiplash-like so they can swim upstream into the Fallopian tube. Once there, sperm bore into the egg. The first one to penetrate the outer layer fuses with the egg membrane beneath. Immediately, changes in the membrane prevent other sperm entering the egg. This is fertilization and the process of an egg and sperm uniting is known as conception.

From single cell to full-term baby
Fertilization takes 18 to 24 hours, and the first cell of a unique human is called a zygote. The joined sperm and egg contain all the genes responsible for passing on various characteristics from the parents. The zygote begins to divide and takes four to six days to travel down the Fallopian tube to the uterus. At first, cells divide around every 15 hours, but that rate of cell division slows down. At birth a baby has around 60 billion cells that have divided around 40 times.

During the first three weeks of development the cells separate into the layers from which all future organs and tissues develop. From weeks four to eight the embryo starts to look like a tiny human being. After week eight it is now called a fetus. Week nine to birth is mostly a time of growth, development and refinement.

As many of us are not aware of exactly when conception took place, pregnancy is officially dated from the first day of your last period, and it’s assumed that conception takes place at the end of the second week. This puts the average length of pregnancy at 280 days (40 weeks), at which stage the baby is actually 266 days (38 weeks) old.