50 Interesting Facts about Pregnancy

Pregnancy physically changes a woman’s brain structure. Grey matter volume is decreased in certain areas, giving mothers a higher capacity for empathy to help better understand their baby.

2. The human womb has the oxygen equivalent of the top of Mount Everest, which is designed to keep the fetus asleep 95% of the time.

3. ‘Meconium’, the first bowel movement of an infant, can be tested to determine if the mother smoked, drank, or engaged in drug use during pregnancy. Meconium testing can be used in the US to determine the eligibility of the parents to keep their newborn child.

4. Physical exercise during pregnancy has been found to have a positive impact on the cognitive development of the child, as measured using EEG a few days after birth.

5. A 36-year-old Indian man named Sanju Bhagat was teased his entire life for looking pregnant, so he got the condition checked out. The doctors ended up pulling out the hair, hands, bones, and limbs of the man’s twin brother, who had been trapped inside him while they were inside their mother’s womb and continued to grow post-birth, from his stomach.

First modern female pregnancy test was conducted in the 1950s and the procedure involved injecting a woman’s urine into a female frog’s skin. If the woman was pregnant, then within 5-12 hours, the female frog would lay eggs.

7. Pregnant women are affected by morning sickness to protect the unborn fetus in its most vulnerable stage when organs first start developing. It clears her system (via vomit) of substances that typically carry microbes or toxins.

8. During pregnancy, the baby growing in its mother’s womb needs plenty of calcium to develop its skeleton. If the mother doesn’t get enough calcium, her baby will draw what it needs from the mother’s bones. Women often lose 3% to 5% of their bone mass during breastfeeding and recover after.

9. Aztec midwives advised women to continue having sex until the 7th month of pregnancy, saying that, if women abstained, their children would be sickly and weak.

10. There is a disorder that is thought to be purely psychological called Pseudocyesis, where a woman shows all the symptoms of being pregnant except for the presence of a fetus. Their belly grows at the right rate and they can even go into false labor.

Ancient Egyptians had a pregnancy test where potentially pregnant women peed on barley and wheat seeds. Plant growth indicated pregnancy: Barley for a boy; wheat for a girl. Later tests showed that urine of pregnant women does cause plant growth 70% of the time, while urine of non-pregnant does not.

12. A pregnant mother with twins lost one fetus in the first trimester and the other developed a coccyx tumor the size of a fetus that was killing it. In 2016, doctors removed baby LynLee from the womb, cut off the tumor, then put her back in the womb and she was ‘born again’ healthy 12 weeks later.

13. In the early 1900s, obstetricians used to give pregnant women Scopolamine, a drug that inhibits memory formation to prevent women from remembering the experience of childbirth.

14. MTV's 16 and pregnant has been linked to a decrease in teen pregnancies.

15. As many as 55% of all pregnancies end in miscarriage, most often before a woman misses a menstrual period or even knows she is pregnant and that more than 80% of miscarriages occur within the first three months of pregnancy, mostly caused by chromosomal abnormalities.

Ignaz Philipp Semmelweis dropped the mortality rate for childbirth from 12% to 2% after he insisted that doctors wash their hands in between handling cadavers and delivering babies.

17. The seam on the scrotum every man has comes as a result of the fusing together of the proto-vagina in the womb.

18. Female slaves in the American South chewed on the cotton root to abort a pregnancy, decreasing the production of more slave children.

19. The 2% failure rate for condoms means that for every 100 couples using them for 1 year 2 will get pregnant and not 2 times per 100 intercourses.

20. Royal women used to give birth in front of an audience to prove that the child was indeed the fruit of the royal woman’s womb.

The Vlasic pickle Stork mascot was an attempt to capitalize on pregnant women's craving for pickles.

22. If a pregnant mother suffers organ damage during the pregnancy, the fetus can send stem cells to help repair the damage.

23. One in three women in Europe has inherited the receptor for progesterone from Neanderthals-a gene variant associated with increased fertility, fewer bleedings during early pregnancy, fewer miscarriages, and birthing more children.

24. To reduce infanticide, Sweden passed a law in 1778 allowing unwed pregnant women to go to a different area where she is unknown to give birth. The midwife was forbidden to ask her identity or to ask who the father was. The baby was then put in an orphanage.

25. In 2019, a woman in Bangladesh was rushed to the hospital for stomach pains a month after giving birth to her first child. It was discovered that she was in labor again and she gave birth to twins. It was discovered that she had 2 wombs.