Pregnancy: you can’t stop me
Before I got into the pregnancy business, all I knew was that one conceives after some bodily demands, have a throwing up spell followed by bizarre behaviour as the bump continues to show, and finally wails just before the whole estate crowds around the cradle to speak niceties about the latest ‘best thing in town’.
Now I know there is more; from the profound to the somewhat silly. Allow me to dwell on the easier side.It is interesting that the average age of women giving birth has moved from 21 in the 1970’S to 25-29 (from statistics available to me). This attests to the opinion that pregnancy is slowly going down women’s priority lists. I hope by the time the average age hits the 40’S somebody will have an attitude- changing alarm-just so the earth continues to experience human beings.
The number of multiple births, on the other hand, has quadrupled over the past 20 years. Sigh of relief. Do you see what I am seeing? That nature sure has a way of shaping things to serve its own desires- more and more people on planet earth.
Louise Brown, born in Oldham in 1978, was the first of the test-tube babies. More than 1 million babies have been conceived this way since. More proof to the idea that the world is surely getting more pregnant. Another of nature’s apparent repercussions on pregnancy is found in Nigeria. The country has the highest twinning rate in the world at around 4.5 per cent. Some experts attribute this figure to the large consumption of ‘Fufu’ (yams meal). Oh so many Nigeriansl One out of every five Africans is a Nigerian.
And even as pregnancy gets more and more relentless, the It’s a pregnant world little participants are not being left out of its bizarre fun. The babies play with their umbilical cord in mum’s womb. They cry, suck their thumb and dream too.
As that continues to happen, mum’s hair gets fuller, her blood volume increases up to 50 per cent-which makes her skin a little tighter and with some more colour. That tells you why an expectant mum ‘glows’. And her senses are all heightened, to the point of telling what brand of soap you showered with-much later in the day, Forgive her …
Because what do you expect of someone whose uterus is expanding to about 500 times its normal size. Then surprisingly, when the baby is finally shoved out because the body can’t keep it in any longer, her big belly may only need six to eight weeks for it to go back to its original size. Every mum’s prayer.
Very few will tell you pregnancy is an easy time. What seems to make it interesting though is that nobody wants to be left out of the pregnancy band-wagon. Otherwise, why would 1 million women in Kenya get pregnant every year? So ideally, had it not been for economical issues and social expectations, we would have some baby-loving women work at breaking the 172 5-1765 world-record of the Russian lady who gave birth to 69 children; 16 sets of twins, 7 sets of triplets and 4 sets of quadruplets.
END : PG 33 /18-19