pregnant woman: Hey! I’m pregnant!

friend/relative/co-worker/near-stranger: Congratulations! When are you due?

pregnant woman: On [insert super-specific and official-sounding date here]. We’re really excited!

friend/relative/co-worker/near-stranger: Wow; that’s great. Do you know what you’re having yet?

pregnant woman (according to personality and sarcasm level): We don’t know yet. OR A little boy! OR A little girl! OR Gee, I don’t know; a human baby, we hope.

The thing is, though, that the ‘due date,’ or Estimated Date of Delivery (EDD), or EDC (Estimated Date of Confinement), is an incredibly problematic little piece of information. For most people, it’s a
flat-out guess at the date that would be 38 weeks (266 days) after the date of conception, or (even less reliably) 40 weeks after the first day of the pregnant woman’s last menstrual period. The little
wheel-of-due-dates is based on Naegele’s Rule, which was developed in the 1830s; some studies have suggested that other methods of dating (including Nichols’ Rule and the much more nuanced Mittendorf-Williams Rule) are more accurate.

If you don’t keep track of your ovulation and sexual encounters and can’t remember exactly when you started your last period because you are freakin’ busy or not good with dates, or if you have an unusual or irregular menstrual cycle that means you don’t ovulate when Textbook Female Body ovulates, the due date is more fantasy than reality. Often the EDD is established or ‘confirmed’ though ultrasound; this method is more reliable than guessing in determining the gestational age and predicting the actual date of birth, but it’s still wildly less reliable than all the fancy equipment and the big ultrasound bill make it seem.

Thus, in part, the big window:  a baby is considered full-term if he or she is born between three weeks before and two weeks after the EDD. That’s well over a month of ‘due date’! And even that range does not really account for the combined issue of a) unreliable dating of conception or gestational age and b) the obvious but almost-always-overlooked fact that everybody develops at a different rate. My body grows babies a little differently from yours. My fetus grew itself a little differently from yours, too, and quite possibly differently from the next fetus that will set up shop in my uterus. We expect our babies to grow and develop (start walking, start talking, grow taller, decide to stop breastfeeding, etc.) at their own paces once they’re out of the uterus; why do we imagine that we’re machines and they’re little manufactured items on a universal schedule while they’re in there? It’s crazy.

I plead guilty; I pretend my due date meant something.  I still often say that my son was “18 days late.” But did he, like, RSVP? No … And he didn’t look ‘overcooked’ or have any health problems, and ultrasounds to check for potential ‘postdate’ problems showed the world’s healthiest placenta and level of amniotic fluid. Maybe the menstrual-date guesswork and the ultrasound dating were both wrong. Maybe he just needed to hang out in there a little longer than most. I don’t know; my
body has never acted like a machine, and I’m cool with that. But I do know that lots of care providers would have bullied me into induction because of this silly date that they made up, instead of watching and waiting for my body to do its thing.

I understand that doctors and midwives need to have an idea of gestational age so that they can track the health of a pregnancy and watch out for the problems that can arise when babies are born prematurely or stick around in the uterus so long that the placenta or amniotic fluids begin to give up on their vital tasks. But I think I’d prefer not to have a ‘due date’ the next time around. Just tell me, ‘hey, you’ll probably have this baby sometime next summer [or whenever]–any time after the beginning of June [or whenever] would be cool.’

Editor’s pick by Deb at Missives From Suburbia.  Molly’s writing on … and a Doula, Too combines the practical and factual aspects of birth and pregnancy, along with real-life stories from her own experiences as a doula, woman and mother.  It makes for fascinating reading by anyone who is interested in natural childbirth, breastfeeding and parenting (especially co-parenting) in a quickly-evolving world.  Do head on over and check out her archives, and while you’re there, you can reread A Month of Due Dates (originally titled “Due Dates”) and subscribe to her feed.