Making Sense of Pregnancy: What Experts Want you To Know About Your Body
Have you been surprised by what we do and don't know about pregnancy and birth today? If you are pregnant, or have been in the past, this show helps you understand what's happening (or has happened) to our bodies--both the short term and long term effects of this transformation. We explore the boundaries of our scientific grasp on the wildly complex processes of pregnancy and birth.
After my complicated pregnancies, I went looking for answers and have interviewed hundreds of experts about women's health in this transition.
Every Tuesday you'll hear:
- Scientists at the cutting edge who are trying to uncover how pregnancy and birth work and what happens when they don't work
- Information you could use to better understand your own body in pregnancy
- .A better sense of the limits of your responsibility for what's happening inside your body
- Listen to hear what you won't find on a blogpost or a book off the shelf.
Making Sense of Pregnancy: What Experts Want you To Know About Your Body
Who is feeding the embryo while the placenta is under construction?
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We all know the placenta as this life giving organ, the first to develop in pregnancy; a critical connection between mother and fetus that sends food and oxygen to the baby and eliminates the fetal waste products. Only recently did I trip over the fact that it takes a minute to make this incredible organ.
How long does it take and while its under construction?
How exactly is the embryo and then fetus being fed ?
In fact, it takes about eight or nine weeks for your body to build a placenta and then a few weeks to get the hookup to the mother's body, which takes us to roughly the end of the first trimester, 10 to 12 weeks or so.
So if that's the case, you might be wondering: how is that embryo getting food for the first 12 weeks? Doesn't it need food to grow and oxygen maybe. What are we doing with the waste? How is all this managed before the placenta is the onsite perfect and all powerful fetal growth manager in a word, womb milk, or histotroph
This is the subject of today's episode.
To contact me with questions or suggestions, find me at:
makingsenseofpregnancy@yahoo.com or @makingsenseofpregnancy