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Pregnancy lasts 40 weeks. In order for a doctor to calculate your due date, you are asked to give the first day of your last period and they use their little handy calendar wheel and come up with an estimated due date (counting 40 weeks from the date of your
last period).
Wait. They start counting from the first day of your last period? How could that be, you ask?
This is done because for most women, we cannot pin point with accuracy the day of ovulation. So experts make a few assumptions in order to give you a due date:
· that you have a 28 day cycle
· that you have a regular cycle (always 28 days)
On a 28 day cycle, a woman ovulates on day 14. This means she is not pregnant for the first 14 days (2 weeks) of the actual pregnancy. Day 14, or week 2, would actually be the day of the deed itself. Should the man and woman get lucky (or unlucky, as the case may be), the fertilized egg takes 10-14 days to implant itself in the uterus. The hormone hCG (the hormone that a home pregnancy tries to detect) is only produced by the fertlized egg AFTER it implants. So then and only then could a woman find out that she is pregnant and by that time, the woman is actually already on week 4 of the pregnancy.
Remember the assumptions above. They are just that, assumptions. We all know that we all don’t have a 28-day cycle and only some of us are regular. As for me, the longest cycle I have charted is 36 days and the shortest is 33.
So clearly, the due date given by doctors and midwives is not an exact date. In fact, most women give birth within 2 weeks BEFORE or AFTER their due date, which is why babies born at 38 weeks are already considered full term babies.
Symptoms of pregnancy during week 1 and 2: ABSOLUTELY NOTHING out of the ordinary as women are not pregnant at this point. Week 1 and 2 are just the same as any other days. The first 2 weeks are just markers for the first day of the last menses.
(November 2007) (
