Fancy That Friday – Anyone Up For a Short Round of Gestation?

By the ticker atop this page
I spy baby’s gestational age.

(Not quite Shakespeare, but pretty good for off-the-top of my befuddled mommy head)

During my first pregnancy, I was very grateful for the full 40 week long gestation period. Nature is so inspired, I thought. Pregnancy needs to be this long so a new mother has time to prepare.

During my second pregnancy, I was slightly less grateful for the full 40 weeks. This time around, nature was not so inspired. For pity sake, come out already! I’ve done my time! This reaction may have stemmed from the fact that Dylan decided to be a couple days late.

And now during my third pregnancy, I feel that 40 weeks is entirely too long. What was Nature thinking?! Maybe first-time mothers need a ramp-up period, but I know my way around a pregnancy by now. Let’s get on with it already. 20 weeks. Now that would be just about right.

I can’t imagine how woman who have six or ten or even fourteen children feel. They must get tired of a pregnancy before it even starts. Or they’re better women than I. (Either option is entirely possible).

This got me thinking. Where do we humans fit in the grand scale of gestation periods (defined as the period of time between fertilization and birth in mammals or the amount of time spent in the mother’s uterus)? In other words, how bad do we have it? And how much worse could it be? So today I present the shortest and longest gestation periods:

The Shortest Gestation Period: 12 to 13 days (before you even had time to buy the pregnancy test, you’ve delivered). This record is shared by three marsupials (mammals in which the young are born prematurely and finish developing in the mother's pouch – don’t human
mothers wind up carrying around their young too?): the American or Virginian opossum; the rare water opossum (yapok) of central and northern South America; and the eastern native cat of Australia.

Those lucky dogs marsupials.

The Longest Gestational Period: 660 days (on average), with a maximum of 760 days (an average of 22 months, with an overdue pregnancy lasting just over two years). This record belongs to the African elephant.

A better female than I.

So, for those of you currently baking a bun or two (or those considering a 40 week dip in the gene pool of gestation), I’ve come to the following conclusion: As your ankles swell and you begin to lose sight of your feet remember, nature may not seem entirely fair, but we could have it a lot worse.

Note: The pictures of the animals in this post appear in the order they are mentioned in the text. The picture of me pregnant was taken shortly before Lij was born. The only reason I have a “belly” in the picture is because I’m massively arching my back to achieve one.