and process of birth. There is, of course, not a moral equivalency. There is no Church teaching on how a woman should give birth or make specific birth choices, as there is with contraception. Sometimes we can and should intervene in the natural process of birth. But learning how our body is designed to birth allows us to work better with that design and have a better, healthier, more informed experience for ourselves and our babies.
The Most Important Lesson
So what should a woman know about birth?
The female body was designed to give birth. Even if she never understands the precise logistics or anatomy of how it happens, a woman who has the confidence that her body was naturally designed to create and to bear life is at an incalculable advantage. As Pope Saint John Paul II expressed it: “The woman’s motherhood in the period between the baby’s conception and birth is a bio-physiological and psychological process which is better understood in our days than in the past, and is the subject of many detailed studies. Scientific analysis fully confirms that the very physical constitution of women is naturally disposed to motherhood — conception, pregnancy and giving birth — which is a consequence of the marriage union with the man.”55 The pope reaffirms this truth: Women’s bodies are designed by God to birth. A woman’s fertility, her ability to carry, birth, and nurse a child, are all representative of good and normal health. As Catholics we reject the contraceptive mentality that tells us fertility is a disease to be cured and the birth of a child a punishment to those who haven’t been “responsible.”
For good or for bad, a woman brings her past, her social environment, and her deepest beliefs and fears into her birth. When a woman comes from a line of women who have successfully and confidently given birth, when she maintains a healthy body image, when she views her marriage and motherhood as a calling from God, when her husband has confidence in her ability to give birth to their baby, and when she hears confident and beautiful words about her womanhood and motherhood from her provider and even leaders of the Church, she will then have deeper confidence that she was truly made for and capable of this work. On the opposite end, if a woman has only heard horror stories about birth, if she has never seen a woman undergoing normal labor, if her husband doubts her, or if she has come to believe that her body is broken, then she will often bring that into her approach to birth.
We know that the effects of original sin mean everything does not always go according to God’s original plan. Infertility occurs. Miscarriage happens. Birth complications do happen. We know that the original design is the healthiest way for a baby to be born. When complications arise, intervening for the sake of the mother or baby also should be considered part of God’s plan. Science and medicine are meant to be a gift to the world — at the service of life. We thank God for the obstetricians, doctors, and midwives who use their gifts to serve women and babies and intervene when appropriate.
Still, we trust that God planned birth, and he knew what he was doing. His design has been bringing new babies into the world for thousands of years. It makes sense, and it works.
The Everyday Miracle
Most of us know by now how conception works. The husband’s sperm meets the wife’s egg. At that very moment God infuses a new, never-before-existing soul into a new body. Within a week or two that blastocyst baby has traveled through one of the woman’s fallopian tubes and becomes embedded in the uterus, an incredible miracle every time. There, he or she will hopefully stay tucked away in the mother’s womb for another nine months or so, growing at phenomenal rates, developing organs, sustained by the mother’s blood. The baby is attached via an umbilical cord from the abdomen to the placenta. That place where the umbilical cord is attached will eventually become a belly button. The placenta, truly an amazing thing and sometimes referred to in the birth world as “the tree of life,” is an entirely new organ that the mother grows in order to feed and nourish her baby. It is firmly attached to the uterus on one side and to the baby via the umbilical cord on the other. It is the only organ that the human body routinely grows from scratch and then discards. For the baby in utero, it functions as almost every major organ at once.
All of this occurs with very little conscious “doing” on the mother’s part. She may be eating well and supplementing with vitamins and doing her best to take care of herself for her baby’s sake, which are all good and helpful, but she doesn’t have to consciously do any of the growing or nourishing of her baby. Her body is giving, nourishing, and growing this baby, while she works and plays, sleeps and eats. We sometimes hear about women who don’t even realize they are pregnant until halfway through or even further along in their pregnancies. Their body grew a baby without their awareness that it was happening. This, of course, does not mean that pregnancy is always successful. We know the heartbreak of miscarriage. Not every baby develops properly — sometimes this is avoidable and sometimes it isn’t. But this doesn’t discount the fact that the baby’s development lies mostly outside of the mother’s conscious will and work.
Where the miraculous meets the natural, a baby develops and grows against all odds and yet outside of any drastic intervention. The same holds true for birth itself. We can cooperate with our body’s good design, work with it, understand what is happening, and have a good provider so that appropriate measures can be taken to help if needed. But it’s truly transformative for a woman to realize that her body already knows how to give birth and the majority of the time would do it just fine without a whole lot of help.
When Are You Actually Due?
Before we discuss the biological interplay of how birth happens, let’s talk about how long a pregnancy truly lasts.
When will that baby finally be ready, anyway? Babies are considered “at term” when they are anywhere from thirty-seven to forty-two weeks. This means, contrary to what your due date suggests, there is actually a full five weeks during which mom could naturally go into labor. Almost all women, when left on their own, will naturally go into labor sometime during those five weeks.
This is why it’s helpful to consider your due date an estimate, and it’s vitally important that it be accurately calculated. Women who practice natural family planning or who at least have an understanding of their cycles and fertility have an advantage in this area. They have a better idea of the signs of ovulation and can better estimate within a day or two when baby was likely conceived.
The standard for dating a pregnancy, even today, is still to go by the start date of your last period and count from there. This means that, according to the dating system most in use, pregnancy begins before the baby was even conceived! So, when a woman talks about being six weeks pregnant, her baby is actually only about four weeks old. And that’s only if she ovulated right on day fourteen of her cycle — which is a big, and often incorrect, assumption. Using the date of your last period to determine your due date assumes that you experienced the “official” twenty-eight-day cycle and ovulated on day fourteen. But how many women have that textbook cycle every month? (It’s worth noting that the same medical system that mocks the “rhythm method” actually uses it when dating pregnancies this way.)
This method of dating, based on gestation of ten lunar months, follows Naegele’s Rule, attributed to a nineteenth-century German doctor. This method calculates the estimated due date by adding one year to the first day of the last menstrual period, subtracting three months, and adding seven days. The result is approximately 280 days (forty weeks) from the start of the last period, and this is how the paper-wheel calculators in your provider’s office or online calculators usually work. It is actually unclear whether Naegele himself used the first day of the period or the last day to calculate the due date, which would change the calculation significantly.56
Clearly, there are many ways in which using the first day of the last menstrual cycle can give a flawed result. An accurate due date can make the difference between going into labor naturally with a simple, complication-free birth and being pressured into an induction (and the risks included) for being “late” because the doctor thinks the pregnancy is further along than it truly is. This can even mean the difference between a healthy baby and a baby sent to the NICU or who has other struggles simply because they were taken out before they were ready.
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