The First Three Trimesters: Your Fetus’s Happy Life in
Your Womb
Did you think your baby was ready to be born after your nine months
of pregnancy? God knows you were ready! But in many ways, your baby
wasn’t. Newborns can’t smile, coo, or even suck their fingers. At birth,
they’re really still fetuses and for the next three months they want little
more than to be carried, cuddled, and made to feel like they’re still
within the womb.
However, in order to mimic the sensations he enjoyed so much in your
uterus, you need to know what it was like in there. Let’s backtrack to the
time when your fetus was still in the womb and see life through his eyes.
Imagine you can look inside your pregnant uterus. What do you see?
Just inside the muscular walls, silky membranes waft in a pool of
tropical amniotic waters. Over there is your pulsating placenta; like a
twenty-four-hour diner, it serves your fetus a constant feast of food and
oxygen.
At the center, in the place of honor, is your precious baby. He’s
protected from hunger, germs, cold winds, mean animals, and
rambunctious siblings by the velvet-soft walls of your womb. He looks
part-astronaut—part-merman as he floats weightlessly in the golden
fluid. Over these nine months, your fetus develops at lightning speed.
His brain adds two hundred fifty thousand nerve cells a minute, and his
body grows one billion times in weight and infinitely in complexity.
Let’s zoom in on your baby’s last month of life inside you. It’s getting
really tight in there. Like a little yoga expert, your fetus is nestled in,
folded and secure. However, contrary to popular myth his cozy room is
neither quiet nor still. It’s jiggly (imagine your baby bouncing around
when you hustle down the stairs) and loud (the blood whooshes through
your arteries, creating a rhythmic din noisier than a vacuum cleaner).
Amazingly, all this commotion doesn’t upset him. Rather, he finds it
soothing. That’s why unborn babies stay calm during the day but
become restless in the still of the night. It’s an ideal life in there—so why
do babies pack up and pop out after just nine months, when they’re still
so immature?
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