Let’s talk about making babies.
“Making babies” is the thing you say—the thing we’ve said for so long about the actions that lead to pregnancy. So let me let you in on a little secret: Sex isn’t how babies are made.
Sex is how zygotes are made—that unicellular organism that comes into being at the time of conception. Sex makes the zygote, not the infant that comes at the end of nine months.
It is true that, in a sense, the growing embryo forms itself via biological programming that has been around for millions of years. But it is a collaboration, not a solo act.
A whole support system is created—an entirely new organ called the placenta is formed that links the circulatory system of the mother to the fetus inside of her. Every bit of material for that new organ, and for the organism growing inside her, comes directly from her, either from material that is already a part of her or from the food, water, and even oxygen that she takes in.
Meanwhile, pregnancy drastically changes the mother’s metabolism, increasing her blood supply by around 50 percent, which increases her heart rate and can also cause conditions like gestational hypertension and gestational diabetes. I had both with my last pregnancy.
The point is that during pregnancy, a mother’s body, bodily processes, and metabolism become intimately intertwined with the being growing inside of her, which is why complications of that pregnancy can lead very quickly to her death.
I have a five-month-old. My husband went to great lengths to support me during and after my pregnancy, and I deeply appreciate his efforts. However, he didn’t “make” our babies.
My second son—my third child—took nine exhausting months to make. He was not a baby at the moment of conception. The unicellular zygote is not a baby. The bundle of cells it forms that may go on to form an embryo is also not a baby, even if it happens to implant and kick off a pregnancy. The embryo that comes after is not yet a baby, even though, if it is healthy, it will start to form the tissues that may someday become the internal organs of a baby.
And if it is born prematurely, what you will have is still a not-fully-formed infant, even though we think of it as a baby once it is born. It will spend weeks or months in a neonatal intensive care unit where, should it survive, it will finish the process of forming the organs and systems needed to survive as a human infant.
It takes many, many months of metabolic work on the part of the mother to make a healthy infant. Months of aches, exhaustion, sickness, a perpetual struggle with food, cramps like you wouldn’t believe, and then the round-ligament pain, joint pain, swelling, brain fog, and sleepless nights. For me, it also involved more than 20 weeks of meticulous dieting, tracking my blood sugar with four finger pricks a day, tracking my blood pressure, regular exercise, medicine, and then daily insulin shots, dozens of doctor’s visits, and many hours of ultrasounds.
And then there were Braxton Hicks contractions that started at about 24 weeks—just barely past the halfway point—so many sleepless nights being woken by an actively kicking fetus, cramps, and more contractions. And then the final weeks were a nightmare.
I went into real labor on at least three occasions that stalled out. When we finally induced in the 39th week, there were many hours of labor and pain to get that baby out. Literally, from 5 a.m. to 10:12 p.m. that same day was a marathon of intense pain, violent shaking, complications, numbed-out legs itching and tingling, and fear—fear that my baby wouldn’t make it.
The point is that suggesting that that unicellular organism was a “baby” at the moment of conception in order to justify current theological trends is more than a little insulting. It denies the very real experience that every pregnant person has to go through, whether they carry the fetus to term or not.
That not-so-subtle suggestion that an unformed human is already physically and morally no different from a healthy infant is offensive on so many levels.
I scrolled through LinkedIn recently and saw a post about a company proudly proclaiming that it was going to support employees who put babies up for adoption so that “innocent babies” wouldn’t be killed. They think they are being upstanding and “moral.” But to me, the arrogance and cruelty required to suggest that not only is that growing being inside a mother already “a baby,” but that ending a pregnancy is an act that “kills an innocent child,” is astonishing.
You are denying the very real work that every mother has to put in to take that unformed human from zygote to healthy infant. And getting a healthy infant and mother at the end of the process is not inevitable—not at all. Labor and delivery are often very dangerous processes.
I have no doubt that I would have died without the hours of attention and care that multiple nurses and doctors gave me on my final day of pregnancy.
It requires such arrogance and meanness to suggest that that baby is already made at the moment of conception. That the next nine months of careful effort—very literal blood, sweat, and tears—are all so inevitable that it is as if they have already occurred.
None of that is inevitable. None of it is a given. And even if all goes well, every pregnancy exacts a physical toll on the mother’s body.
I’m done humoring the bad-faith ugliness of the pro-birth movement. I’m done trying to meet people halfway who supposedly “really believe” that it is okay to describe a unicellular organism and then the developing embryo as an “innocent baby.”
What a zygote is and what it may become are fundamentally different. A zygote may contain the genetic instructions for development, but it is not already the infant it may become. Getting from one to the other requires months of gestation, the literal metabolic work of the mother’s body, the care she receives, and consequential choices she must make along the way. To insist that the baby already exists at conception is to erase everything required to make it.