So, when are you due?
This is the most frequently asked question I’ve heard during all three of my pregnancies. I’m sure the same is true for most women. Everyone from close family and friends to strangers you meet in the checkout line want to know: when are you due?
Having a general idea of when you can expect to have a baby is fine, but it gets pretty frustrating when you reach your “due date” and are still pregnant. Especially when you pass that date.
Well, I am at that point now. And I am tired of people acting as though it is an awful ordeal to be pregnant past my due date. Maybe I’m weird, but I am totally fine still having the baby inside instead of in my arms. Not that I don’t want to meet my baby, because I definitely do. I can’t wait to meet this new addition to our little family. However, I realize that a due date isn’t set in stone, it isn’t usually accurate, and a baby will come when a baby is ready. Unless you force it. The worst part of this very end of pregnancy isn’t the largeness, the heat (I hope I am never extremely pregnant in July again!), or the fact that I cannot sleep without pillows propping up my belly. Or even the brutal rounds of contractions I’ve had for the last month. The worst part is the pitying looks or comments when someone knows this baby is “late.” And pointing out the obvious with a question: so… no baby yet?
People, it’s not late!
I wish we could just do away with due dates. Maybe it should be an estimated birth month instead. Or, in my case, an estimated birth window of late June/early July.
Let me tell you a little bit about due dates and why we really need to stop treating the calendar as our ultimate authority.
First, every baby is different. Just like no two people develop at the same pace, so no two babies develop at the exact same pace. The 40 weeks of gestation time is an estimate. Some babies arrive sooner, most babies arrive later. If a healthy mother is allowed to go into labor on her own, with no induction forced on her, the average length of pregnancy is 42 weeks and a couple days. If you think about it, when doctors induce at 40 weeks, or even 41 weeks, they are inducing many babies who are not ready to be born.
Second, the pregnancy calendar wheel is inherently flawed. All pregnancy wheel charts that determine when a woman’s official due date is are based on a fertility cycle of 28 days, with ovulation occurring 14 days after the beginning of the menstrual cycle. I’ll give you one guess as to why this is a problem. Yep, you got it. No two women are the same. Imagine that! And because no two women are the same, there is a large range of when conception actually occurs. Some women have closer to 20-day cycles, and some women have close to 40-day cycles. That is a big difference, and a huge range of possible conception dates. Also, menstrual cycles begin roughly 12-16 days after ovulation, so the ovulating-on-day-14 idea is fundamentally flawed as well. Even if the 40-week gestation was correct for every single baby, the simple fact that the actual date conception can vary between women so drastically would throw off the dates by a couple weeks either way!
So, if you are pregnant or know someone else who is, don’t get caught up in the dates! They are always an estimate, and just because a woman is past her due date doesn’t mean something is wrong with the baby or the woman. Your body knows what it’s doing. Take care of it with healthy food and exercise, and tell everyone your due date is two weeks later than it actually is. That’s what I’m considering doing next time!
References:
Taking Charge of Your Fertility by Toni Weschler
Ina May’s Guide to Childbirth by Ina May Gaskin
Natural Childbirth the Bradley Way by Susan McCutcheon et al.
Natural Birth Blog 
However there is something called being too late. The baby can’t stay there past 42 weeks or else he/she will die from the lack of food supply.
http://www.babycentre.co.uk/a552040/im-overdue-now-what
Thanks for commenting, Mandy!
While I know a lot of people believe this, it is simply untrue that a baby cannot stay in utero past 42 weeks without dying. That information originated in a study from 1958, but further studies show that the answer is much more nuanced than that. I did read the Baby Centre article, but it is heavily slanted toward early intervention, which increases risk of complications in the health of the baby.
Here is an article that goes more in-depth (http://www.midwiferytoday.com/articles/timely.asp). And here is an excerpt:
“However, when a group of researchers conducted a case-matched review of nearly 300 postdates pregnancies, they concluded that the increased rate of obstetric and neonatal interventions “does not appear to be a result of underlying pathology associated with post-term pregnancy.” They suggest that “a lower threshold for clinical intervention in pregnancies perceived to be ‘at-risk’ may be a significant contributing factor.” In other words, the perceived risk is greater than the actual risk and can become a self-fulfilling prophecy!(5) When monitoring demonstrates that fetal growth, activity and amniotic fluid levels remain within expected norms, the baby can safely wait for spontaneous labor to begin.”
Basically, monitoring a baby is good to make sure she is getting proper nutrients and there are no complications, but letting labor begin spontaneously is better for the baby, even if it is “late.”