Category: Let's talk
Have you ever wondered how a baby would turn out if her gestational period was longer than 9 months? I was talking about this with a friend and I was just curious about it. Well the friend and I were thinking that a baby's brain would certainly have more time to develop, so would that render the baby more of an independent and helpful little creature? Also, would the baby be more smart thus making him into a superhuman? I also see the possibility of negative side affects such as health problems for both baby and mother. What are yall's thoughts?
my thoughts are that you clearly don't know what a gestational period is for
and are of the opinion that they're magical. Which is stupid.
Trisha, here's a more helpful answer.
A gestational period is nothing more or less than a baby's first stage of life. Many babies are born prematurely, long before the planned gestation of nine months, and it simply means that they aren't as well-developed as a baby who stays in the womb to term. If you deliver a baby too early in its gestation, there's a good chance it will die. If you deliver one too late, there's a good chance both baby and mother can die, because the baby will have outgrown its home and may be negatively impacting itself and its mother by remaining. And by too late, I mean, like, more than four weeks too late. And this is why people are induced.
The baby's development, after it has all its requisite parts, will happen almost the same way whether it's inside mom or not. You won't get superhuman intelligence or anything because gestation does not improve such things.
I suppose if our natural gestation period was somehow a year and a half, while everything else remained the same, babies might be born with more awareness and more skills, but that's only because technically it would be like giving birth to a nine-month-old with absolutely zero social interaction to go on.
Short answer: cody's harsh, but he's got a point.
My mistake, I thought that gestation was the period of time in the womb, that is what people have told me.
That is exactly what it is. But time in the womb does not confer a constantly mounting series of benefits.
In rough layman's terms, here's what happens to a baby:
Egg and sperm form a zygote
Zygote begins developing complex cellular structures
Complex cellular structures begin with the brain and work downward
Eventually, tiny baby is formed, complete with proper anatomy; it's small and will continue to form over time
fine details start developing, such as the ability to move arms and legs independently, and the ability to tense and relax fingers
brain and body continue learning how to communicate
baby is born
development continues as usual, with baby growing bigger and more able to move and communicate; only difference is, it's now out in the woorld and can interact and be interacted with
So you see, gestation is the time the baby is in the womb, but really, all it does is fire up a process that will continue apace even if the baby is born prematurely.
If you took a baby from a mother's woomb at three months or so, and put it in some other environment where it was getting the prooper nutrients, it might live and would probably not be too badly impaired.
Babies born two whole months premature, for instance, are smaller, usually weaker and less aware of the world than babies born in term. Their overall intelligence isn't something that the length of gestation alone decides.
Aaaaaaah, I see what she was getting at, but that would be impossible because of the placenta stuff I would think too right? I mean, how will a full blown child eat if that were to happen...
Perhaps I should've been more clear in my firt post, I was asking what would happen to the baby and mother if the baby had stayed in the womb for more than 9 months like say, a year? I heard somewhere about how there was a woman that was pregnant for 40 years or something but don't quote me on it, because I can't remember exactly what the source was nor if I heard correctly.
It sounds like what your referring to is a story about people who have calcified feduses. It's very rare. I think there was a medical oddity show about this or something like it.
There's no way someone could be pregnant for 40 years with a viable baby. I only carried my son until just about 8 months and man alive was I ready for him to leave the woom. lol Acctually, I loved being pregnant but there comes a time when it's just so incredibly uncomfortable. lol
If a baby stayed alive and kept growing, eventually it would simply grow too big. The uterus and stomach cavity in general are only so large, can stretch only so much. Eventually, the sheer amount of nutrients needed by the fetus would exceed the mother's ability to produce as well, and the baby would starve to death. Also, here's a horrible thought. That baby is growing more and more self-aware. It's trying to see and hear and touch things, trying to sit up and roll and kick, in this tiny dark wet little prison, surrounded by all the normal sounds a body makes, plus the blurry sounds from outside the body. Can you imagine the psychological trauma?
No, it wouldn't work. Someone pregnant for forty years obviously had some sort of calcified fetus which had been long, long dead.
Plus we develop depending on the input we receive.
Inside the mother, we have no input.
Plus you are forgetting about the water. Babies are basicly floating until the water is released, so not breathing.
You had an interesting concept though. Smile.
Yeah, but the child was dead. I heard of that story too. Like I said, I see where she was trying to go, but there's nothing to ponder here. It's just impossible, impractible, and stuff.
yes, the child in the case of the 46-year pregnancy was not alive for 46 years.
In addition to the lack of sustenance, as the baby's brain grows so does the head. The head would be too large to clear the birth canal. As it is now, a baby's head can only fit through the canal because the skull plates have not yet fused which allows the skull to flex. That is why baby's immediately after birth often have a mis-shaped head. After birth, the head shape rounds and the bones slowly fuse solid as it grows.
Tricia your question is a good one. I'l be the odd one out here.
Here are your challenges:
Baby humans already have large heads for their size, which makes birthing
them unusual and difficult. A fact you as a mother no doubt are very familiar
with. Lol even my Wife who says she had an "easy" delivery (easy is in quotes,
voice users), it took 12 hours.
She's a very tall chick and so that probably helps. But a chimp would not take
12 hours, or much longer as many human mothers do.
You also have the misfortune of being bipedal. Since you run around on two
legs, which enabled your ancestors to throw projectiles at prey and carry food in
their hands, you have a smaller pelvis than other primates.
The full answer is probably yes, the baby would be more developed. A baby
elephant, a very intelligent animal also, is inside the mother's womb for 2 years.
I don't know if mother elephants hold the same assertions about pregnancy that
many human mothers do, if ever tell each other they just want this thing out of
them. But elephants are quadrupeds, so don't suffer in the lower back and the
sciatic nerves like human mothers do.
Nature is a bitch, and one of the worst tradeoffs for bipedalism is human
gestation and its enormous risks and relatively few benefits.
So long as you're bipedal, you can't gestate for more than nine months in most
cases. It's a fair question. But part of the reason the newborn's skull is as soft
as it is? To (hopefully) make it out the birth canal without damaging the mother.
Even so, it's not a very beneficial outcome for the mother, see every birthing
story you've ever heard.
To that end, I think we'll be best suited to revert to the egg-laying
protoancestors, only using modern technology, by creating an artificial womb
environment. Then the human female can continue to benefit from being
bipedal without having any of the mitigating risks associated with bipedal
pregnancies.
when I was pregnant, my doula said that babies that are severely overdue already look like a real person. what she meant was that they look like a much older baby, not like a newborn, and that actually makes some parents feel uncomfortable.
when I was pregnant, my doula said that babies that are severely overdue already look like a real person. what she meant was that they look like a much older baby, not like a newborn, and that actually makes some parents feel uncomfortable.