The first few months

There's a few things you find out about as soon as you're wife is pregnant. The first is how to worry. Now I'm usually a fairly easy going kind of guy. Not a lot worries me and I can shrug most things off. What you find though is although the pregnancy test shows positive, and the doc says she's up the duff there is still a danger period - and that's the first 12 weeks. How dangerous? Some of the articles I've read quote figures like 1 in 4. With that dropping significantly after the 12th week. So you worry she's going to miscarry which incidentally, is why most couples don't announce they're pregnant to anyone until after that time.



So you get past that worry, and you approach the 12 week mark. Now if you're like a lot of couples (like us) you've probably left having a family a bit later than your parents did which has its upsides. You've lived life a bit, are financially better off etc etc. Now the downside. When your wife is born, all the eggs that she'll ever have are created. What that means is unlike your swimming fellas, they age as she does. The problem with that is, after a certain age (around 36) the chances of the baby having chromosomal defects sky rockets. Those defects are the sort that cause things like Down's syndrome.

Still with me? Something else you find is that this pregnancy business is a bit of a numbers game too and if you have any questions of being pro choice or against abortions then you need to sort them out around this time. At 12 weeks a Nuchal Translucency screen can be done. This takes a measurement of part of the babies neck from an ultrasound and a blood test from your wife, puts it together with your wives age and some other factors and comes out with the likely hood of the child having Down's syndrome or some other defect. The upside of the screening test is that is poses no harm to the baby. The downside is it's only about 90% accurate. There is a test to be absolutely sure - it's called a amniocentesis. Problem with that one is, there is about a 1 in 200 chance of it causing a miscarrige. Oddly enough the textbooks say a 36/37 year old woman (without testing done) has about a 1 in 200 change of having a baby with Down's syndrome.

Now hopefully you can see where the abortion comments come from. If you are anti-abortion you don't really have to make any decisions, in fact, you may not decide to go with an NT scan as you'd be having the baby anyway. If not, then you're hoping the NT test comes back with a nice large number. If it doesn't, you're faced with the question of whether to do the amnio and risk miscarriage. Then if it comes back positive, you're faced with the question of whether to abort the pregnancy or not.

Getting past the morbid stuff, the ultrasound is AMAZING! If you weren't planning to accompany your wife to it, I would strongly suggest you reconsider. For me, whilst my wife had been feeling a bit unwell in the morning and was getting a bit bigger around the tum, seeing that child in there, flipping around and starting to look like a human - well, it made it absolutely real.