Week 15: Who cares?

When last week Vivian said that everyone's keen to find out what bit is growing this week, I think she assumed everyone wanted to know this information. Nobody explicitly asked for it. But let's face it, when you've started a blog about your unborn child, there's really not much else to talk about is there.

The truth is, if you read about the week by week development of a baby, it all starts to get a bit monotonous. 'Week 11: the liver starts to develop. Week 12: the liver develops a bit more. Week 13: tastebuds start to develop. Also, the liver develops more still. Week 14: the liver is now fully developed. Ears are starting to grow.' Week 15: though fully developed, the liver continues to grow in size. Etc etc.
Of course, they spice things up a bit to make it more interesting. So not only do these taste buds develop, your baby can 'probably taste the food you eat'... while frowning, and dreaming, and listening to the music you play on your stereo. You can't help but think they sometimes make it up as they go.

It does make for very interesting reading though. Take week 13 for instance (and allow me to plagiarise from this particular website the same way Vivian obviously did last week):
“If you're having a girl, she now has approximately 2 million eggs in her ovaries; she will have only a million by the time she's born. She'll have fewer eggs as she gets older, and by age 17, the number will have dropped to 200,000.”

That's just incredible on several levels.
First of all, this baby was itself a single egg just 13 weeks before; now it has ovaries that contains half the population of Sydney's worth of eggs.
Then there's the drastic reduction in numbers from that moment on, as though they've all signed on to some massive Idol competition and have to prove themselves worthy in front of a panel of judges one by one or get a one-way ticket to the egg- shredder.
Then there's the lab assistant who was asked to count all 2 million, only to have the results submitted to some medical journal by the supervising researcher who took all the credit. My thought's go out to him.

All these wonderful titbits of information are there so the mother can lovingly cradle her tummy, and 'know' what's going on inside there. If it wasn't for these books and websites, there really wouldn't be much going on in your life besides a steadily growing belly. It's business as usual. That's why some woman can carry all the way through to full term and not know they were pregnant, instead thinking they were a bit constipated.

But a large shadow looms over all of this baby-bliss. As I read about these amazing little facts and figures as the weeks pass, I can't help but keep wondering: How many foetuses have been dissected on a stainless steel tray with a very sharp scalpel in a cool, brightly lit laboratory in order to provide us with all this amazing info? Surely more than a couple.

And on that bombshell; Goodnight!

David.

Ps: Vivian recently unlocked the ability to leave comments to anyone who cares to do so, and instructed me to inform everyone, because as it stands she's already checking this blog 10 times a day to see if someone left a comment, or whether our list of loyal followers has expanded, and is sure to check 20 times a day from now on.