10-month pregnancies?
We learn in school that a pregnancy lasts 9 months. However, in his books, Śrila Prabhupāda mentions 10 months. How to explain this difference? Who is wrong?
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We learn in school that a pregnancy lasts 9 months. However, in his books, Śrila Prabhupāda mentions 10 months. How to explain this difference? Who is wrong?
It’s actually not so simple. The figure of 9 months we learn in school is, in reality, an approximation. According to modern medicine, a baby is fully developed by the end of the 37th week, but the birth can happen at any point from the end of the 37th week up to the 42nd week.
Who decides whether a baby is fully developed or not? That’s the point. The reason the baby is considered “fully developed” at the end of the 37th week in modern medicine is just to provide an approximate date from which the baby is not considered premature. If a baby is born at less than 37 weeks, he will be put on special care in most hospitals. After the 37th week, the baby is considered ready, and you can take him home after the delivery. The 37th week is also a guide for how soon a C-section may be performed.
This is, however, just another example of the tendency in allopathic medicine of reducing everything to numbers and labels, failing to consider the complexities of each particular case. In reality, the development of each baby is different. Some babies develop a little faster, and others take a little longer. When there is a natural birth, very rarely will a baby come in the 37th week.
Although 42 weeks is considered the maximum a baby will stay in the womb in normal circumstances, it is also not a sure thing. Some babies can be born after 43 weeks, and some may even come after 44 weeks. The reason most babies are born after a maximum of 42 weeks is just that after this, most physicians will start to press the parents, recommending a C-section.
Another difference is that in the Vedas, pregnancy is counted from the day of conception, while in Western medicine, it is counted from the start of the last period. We can see that this shows an interesting difference in both cultures. In Vedic culture, people used to know the exact time the baby was born since they would follow the process of garbhādhāna-saṁskāra, while in Western culture, most of the time, people have no idea of when conception took place and prefer to count starting from the last period.
Because of this difference in the way it’s counted, the number given by the doctor is actually two weeks more than the number we got by following the Vedic calculation. A baby who is born at 37 weeks is actually just 35 weeks baby according to the Vedic formula (245 days), which is quite early, and a 42-week baby is actually 40 weeks old (280 days). A baby that is born at 44 weeks (by the Western calculation) will be 294 days old.
We also have a difference in the way the months are counted. The Vedas use the lunar calendar, where the months have 30 days. In this way, 10 months equals 300 days or a little less than 45 weeks by the Western calculation. We can see then that the figure given in the Vedas refers to the theoretical maximum that a baby will stay in the womb, much like the figure of 120 years for the life of a human being that is given in the jyotiḥ-śāstra, which not many people will be able to attain.
When the pregnancy is allowed to go without interruptions and the baby is born out of natural birth at his own time, most babies will, according to the Western calculation, be born at 42 weeks, and a few will take 43 weeks or more.
This golden rule given in the Vedas illustrates thus an important point: modern medicine is fond of creating artificial rules based on measurements and other factors, while the Vedic idea is to let things happen in their own time. In Western medicine, a baby is considered “ready” after 37 weeks, but in the Vedas, the baby is considered ready when he or she is ready.
When we consider that a baby may stay in the womb up to almost 45 weeks, to make a C-section and force a baby who is just 37 weeks old to take birth doesn’t sound like such a good idea.
In this way, we can see that the knowledge given in the Vedas is accurate and relevant. We just need to examine it from the right perspective.
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