23 Fascinating Facts About Pregnancy, Birth & Breastfeeding
One in every 2000 infants is born with natal teeth. Weird, right? Read below for more wild and interesting facts that I bet you didn't know.
I thought I would do something a little different this time and put together a list of interesting and unique facts about pregnancy, childbirth, breastmilk, breastfeeding and baby development. Each one contains a link to additional information if you’re interested in learning more. I was also careful to research each one in depth so that I could provide as much accuracy as possible. Read on for more insight!
One in every 2000 to 3000 infants is born with teeth (called natal teeth), which are pulled out shortly after birth by doctors to prevent choking, injury, and biting.
More studies are done on coffee, wine and tomatoes than on human breast milk. Imagine how much more we could learn if researching breast milk was more of a priority…
Although the U.S. spends more money than any other country on health care and maternal care (four trillion dollars in 2021), it’s the most dangerous developed country to give birth in (maternal mortality in the US rose 40% in 2021 with black women being three times more likely to die than white women).
Human moms tend to hold their babies on the left side of their bodies. This left-handed bias likely has to do with the human brain’s lopsided layout: sensory information on the left side of the body is processed on the right side of the brain.
The baby forms all of his unique fingerprints by 9 to 12 weeks in the womb.
The placenta, made from the sperm and egg, is the body’s only disposable organ. Also, as soon as it takes over hormone production in the second trimester, most women’s fatigue and nausea dissipates.
If a mother damages an organ during pregnancy, the baby in the womb sends stem cells to help repair the damage. Absolutely incredible.
A woman induced into labor (stimulation of labor contractions) and given an epidural is 2.4 times more likely to need a C-section.
Even though 95% of women are considered “low-risk” and able to give birth without medical intervention, only 0.99% give birth at home and 0.52% give birth in freestanding birth centers. I believe there would be great benefit if we were more educated on this specific topic or were told more in depth about our options.
Breast milk sprays from multiple holes in the nipple, and the amount of holes varies from mother to mother (can vary between three to twenty holes). Also, babies remove about 67% of the milk you have available.
A 2013 study found that when mothers and babies both had colds, levels of white blood cells in milk jumped by a factor of 64 as a response to infection.
A 2016 study found that melatonin levels were nearly five times higher in breast milk produced at night than during the day. Another report found that cortisone and cortisol levels were higher in morning breast milk than in milk produced at any other time.
In 2018, it finally became legal to breastfeed in public across all 50 states.
The metabolic energy needed to breastfeed a baby each day is the amount needed to walk seven miles.
Breastmilk can be various colors - blue, green, yellow, pink, or orange depending on what you eat or drink.
If nearly all new mothers breastfed, nearly 820,000 infant lives could be saved each year and 13% of all deaths could be prevented (in kids under the age of five).
The United Kingdom has the lowest breastfeeding rates in the world (only 0.5% of mothers still breastfeeding at one year), while 99% of mothers in Senegal breastfeed.
The tiny bumps on a woman’s areola are called Montgomery glands, which smells like amniotic fluid so that the baby can easily navigate themselves to the breast.
Analyzing ancient clay vessels from child graves in Germany, scientists recently found the residue of milk from hoofed animals and identified the vessels as primitive baby bottles, the earliest dating back more than 7,000 years. This suggests that mothers have been bottle-feeding since prehistory.
Scientists suspect that a tweak to human moms’ breast tissue helped some populations survive the last ice age. Roughly 20,000 years ago, vital vitamin D would have been increasingly difficult for babies dwelling at far-northern latitudes to harvest through sunlight and exposed skin. Luckily a genetic mutation arose in mothers’ breast ducts, making it possible to provide more fat and vitamin D to those infants living in places where there was scarcity of ultraviolet radiation.
According to a new study, adequacy of vitamin B12 in breast milk is particularly important for infants during the first six months of life (and beyond) in order to support brain development.
At birth, babies see only in black and white and shades of grey. After about four months they see in color.
In Greek times, the “perfect” wet nurse (a woman who breastfeeds another woman’s child) would be between the ages of 20 to 40, given birth at least two times, nursed children of the same sex and have medium sized breasts. A good wet nurse would also be one who was good-tempered, well-nourished, clean and gentle.