Inside the Womb: 45 Surprising Facts About the Journey of Pregnancy

Out of over 5000 mammal species, female humans are the only ones whose breasts remain permanently enlarged when not lactating.

27. Every unborn baby grows a mustache in the womb, which then spreads to cover the entire body. The baby then eats this fine hair, called lanugo, and excretes it after birth with their first bowel movement, which is a substance called meconium.

28. In the US, maternal deaths during pregnancy declined to 9.1 deaths per 100,000 pregnancies by 1986. It has risen since then and now is at 18.5 deaths per 100,000.

29. The first thing we develop in the womb is an anus. For the first few seconds of our life, we were nothing but floating anuses.

30. It is possible for a human to become a chimera by fusing with his/her fraternal twin in the womb. If it occurs early enough, each twin will claim body parts as his/her own, allowing a single person to be made up of two genetically different individuals.

Lady Margaret Beaufort, the mother of King Henry VII gave birth to him at the age of 13. The pregnancy was so difficult for her, due to her size and youth that it made her unable to have any more children. By the age of 15, she had been married 3 times.

32. According to an analysis by the Guttmacher Institute, unplanned pregnancies cost US taxpayers $2.1 billion each year. More than half of U.S. pregnancies are unintended, and roughly 1-in-20 American women of reproductive age have an unplanned pregnancy each year.

33. The longest pregnancy on record lasted over a year and produced a perfectly healthy baby girl.

34. Babies pick up on the cadences and rhythms of their mother tongue while in the womb, and you can tell the difference between French, German, and English babies just by their gurgles and cries.

35. Since every baby girl is born with up to two million eggs in her ovaries, a woman who is pregnant with a girl is not only carrying her baby, but also the beginnings of her grandchild, and her diet and lifestyle can impact the make-up of the eggs in the child’s reproductive system.

A father's genes promote the baby’s weight in the womb, regardless of maternal health, while a mother’s genes limit the baby's weight, regardless of fetal health, and a delicate balance is achieved via this conflict.

37. Evolutionary psychologists suggest that rounded buttocks may have evolved as a desirable trait because they provide a visual indication of the woman’s youth and fertility. They signal the presence of estrogen and the presence of sufficient fat stores for pregnancy and lactation.

38. We have reached “peak child” some years ago. The number of children in the world is not increasing anymore and global fertility is trending downwards.

39. A study done on deaths during pregnancy between 1993-1998 found that homicide was the leading cause of death for pregnant women.

40. In 2002, a woman was denied public assistance because a DNA test showed that her children weren’t hers. An attorney helped her prove that she had absorbed her twin in the womb, thus giving her two sets of DNA and that her unborn twin was possibly the biological mother of her children.

A human fetus would have to undergo a gestation period of 18 to 21 months to be born at a neurological and cognitive development stage comparable to that of a chimpanzee newborn.

42. One of the dangers of working in a try-works (a furnace in the whaling industry) is that a rotting pregnant whale could fill with gas and burst, ejecting a fetus the size of a motor vehicle with sufficient force to kill a man.

43. Dr. Frances Kelsey was a female Canadian/American pharmacologist working for the FDA in the 1960s who stopped authorization of Thalidomide (a drug that caused the deformation in fetuses), saving countless children and also helping reform standards in the FDA/U.S against pharmaceutical companies.

44. Saint Brigid of Kildare is a Catholic Saint who is credited with the miracle of making a pregnant nun’s fetus disappear, “to preserve her chastity.”

45. In 1955, a woman in Morocco went into labor and needed a C-section. Terrified of the surgery, she fled the hospital and never gave birth. About 46 years later, stomach pains revealed the now calcified ‘stone’ baby in her womb.