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In response to
questions: When people say that babies are in the mom's stomach,
we know that's not what they really mean. The baby is actually in
a special organ called a uterus, sort of like a stomach, but
instead of holding food, it holds babies. Every baby is special
and a miracle.
It takes 40 weeks
for a baby to get ready to be born. If a baby comes too early, it
might have a hard time breathing. We might keep it in the hospital
to help it breathe until on its own.
The placenta feeds
the baby and gives it all the oxygen and good food it needs. When
a baby is growing, it is very flexible and can turn around and
touch its feet to the head inside the mom. Babies can blink their
eyes, chew, suck their thumb, wave their arms and legs, or somersaults.
But there is no air, so the baby cannot make any noise. The baby
is floating in a big pool of water in the uterus. The water helps
the lungs develop and keeps its skin soft. It's safe, warm and
dark in there.
When labor happens,
the uterus is a big muscle, and it squeezes the baby outside of
mom. The opening, called the cervix, is like a door opening for
the baby to come out. Labor hurts and you should give your mom a
special kiss. When the door is opened wide enough, the baby
squeezes out through a special passage, that only moms and girls
have. Mom has to push hard, and its a good thing babies are
flexible because it's a hard way to come out. Humans have the
biggest heads to make room for our big brains. Sometimes a mom
needs help to get the baby's head out, because the head is so big.
After the baby is out, the uterus shrinks again.
Some babies have
heads that are pretty big and are just too big to fit through, or
sometimes the baby is getting upset, or sometimes the baby is
coming the wrong way around. Then the safest way for those babies
to be born is by Caesarian section. Julius Caesar passed a law
2000 years ago that said that when a baby is in distress, that
they should be removed by surgery. We make a hole in the mom,
called an incision, and cut through 5 different layers, and
finally into the uterus. It's like a back door, or a side door,
and we can help the baby out that way. We have to use stitches to
close the hole back up. Sometimes it easy to have a baby and
sometimes it's hard. But we have medicine to help the moms to take
away the pain if it's hard for them.
When the baby comes
out, it still has the cord attached, so we put a little plastic
clamp on it and cut it. After a couple of weeks, the cord dries up
and falls off. That's where your belly button comes from. We dry
the baby off with a clean towel and usually that's when it starts
to cry.
Most moms have an
ultra sound, its a machine that takes special pictures, and we can
see how the baby is developing.
A real twin is when
a mom has two babies inside the uterus at the same time. Even more
rarely, one time in a thousand there are triplets, and even more
rarely, quadruplets, four babies can be born at one time.
"How long did
you train to be this kind of doctor?" 13 more years after
high school. |
