Growing Up (de Schweinitz)/Chapter 4

by Karl de Schweinitz

From an Egg to a Baby

Chapter IV

From an Egg to a Baby

The egg from which you came was one of thousands of eggs in the ovaries of your mother and the sperm from which you came was one of millions of sperms in the testicles of your father. Once each month an egg leaves one of the ovaries of the mother and goes to the uterus. If when it is in the uterus or on its way there a sperm joins it, the two together—egg and sperm—start growing to be a baby. If no sperms have been sent to meet it the egg stays in the uterus for a little while and then passes out through the vagina. It is so tiny that the mother does not even know that it has left her.

You began your life because the sperm found the egg. The moment they joined each other you started growing. You grew very fast. Your shape changed. You began to have a place for your stomach and another place for your heart and lungs. Then the beginnings of your head and arms and legs showed themselves.

At the end of about one month you looked something like a tiny curled up fish. You were still so small that your whole body could have rested on the nail of your mother's little finger; but you kept on growing.

Another month passed. You were now more than an inch tall and you began to look like a little baby.

After four months had passed, your mother felt you stirring in her body. She now knew that you were alive and that after a few more months you would be ready to be born.

While you were doing all this growing you needed food. At first you were fed in somewhat the same way that a chick is fed when it is growing in the shell. Your egg fed you. Only a small part of an egg, called the nucleus, grows. The rest is chiefly food for the growing part. The growing part soaks the food up into itself very much as a sponge or a washcloth soaks up water.

Courtesy of W. H. Hoedt.

After you had been growing nearly two months in the body of your mother you were only as big as this picture.

Prentiss-Arey after Ahlfeld. Courtesy of W. B. Saunders Co.

The baby in the uterus with the cord through which it is fed from the body of its mother.

After you had used all the food in your egg you were fed by your mother. When your stomach formed, a long tube grew out of it. At the end of this tube was a kind of sponge. This sponge took from your mother the food you needed to help you grow. Perhaps you have noticed a little curled dent, called the navel, in the middle of your body. That is where the tube entered your stomach.

All this time you were living in the uterus of your mother. When you first entered the uterus it was very small, not much bigger than a pear, but as you grew the sides of the uterus stretched to make room for you. Your mother's whole body became larger so that it could take better care of you. Her breasts grew bigger so that they could fill with milk for you to draw from them after your birth.

When you had been growing for nine months you were ready to be born. You were lying in the uterus all curled up like a little kitten asleep. The time had come for you to leave your mother.

The sides of the uterus now stopped stretching. Instead they began to push and to squeeze the baby out. Usually the baby lies with its head pointing downward toward the tube called the vagina which leads to the outside of the mother's body. The vagina is narrow but it stretches as the baby enters it. Slowly the baby passes from the uterus and into the world, going out by the same opening through which nine months before the sperm had gone in. Some babies need a whole day or more in which to make this journey and some babies are born in a few minutes. Perhaps your mother will tell you how long you took to be born.

The pushing and the stretching that the body must do to help the baby to leave the uterus uses up the mother's strength. It is hard work for her—the doctors call it labor—but she is glad because she knows her baby is being born. She either goes to a hospital or calls a doctor and a nurse to her home. They take care of her and of the new born baby. The doctor cuts the tube through which the food had been going from the mother into the stomach of the baby, and from now on the baby will feed through its mouth.

Courtesy of the Philadelphia Child Health Society.

Mother feeding her baby.

The doctor listened eagerly for the first little cry that you made after you were born for then he knew that you were alive; but your mother and your father were happiest of all, for after having waited nine months for you to grow to be a baby they could now at last see you and hold you in their arms.