Visualizing The Connection Between Babies and Moms

Preborn Baby Pictures

Baby footprints visualized through a mom’s tummy wall have been captured in picture. Many families have a photo of a baby’s hand or foot making a bump on mom’s “bump.” Old technology is wonderful, but it has gotten better with the advent of ultrasound. Using 3D and 4D ultrasound, we now have the capability to see our preborn and actually follow it visually within the womb as it develops.

Visualizing The Connection Between Babies and Moms
Seeing Baby Response

Babies can feel and demonstrate response to external stimuli, e.g., sounds besides mom’s heartbeat, daddy’s voice, etc. The sounds may not be scary to mom, but baby will hear and sometimes give mom that familiar “kick” that she readily recognizes. This baby-mom connection has been explored in detail, sometimes visualized by ultrasound.

Baby “Feelings”

Moms have lots of feelings during pregnancy. Moms feel their babies within, but they also have emotions related to those babies. Those feelings in turn affect those little people. Feelings may reflect anxiety, pain, the baby’s movements within the womb, medications, metabolic changes as mom responds to the baby’s normal development, etc. Mom’s feelings have effects on the developing child besides affecting just mom.

Basic Connection

The umbilical cord connects mom and baby. It is a two way street for the baby’s blood to connect with mom via the placenta. Nutrients and oxygen travel from placenta to baby while waste products are carried out to mom via the same placenta. There are a couple arteries on the outward side of this umbilical tube leaving the baby and a vein that carries oxygen and “food” to the baby from the mom’s blood nurturing the placenta. Anomalies in the cord may permit nutrient-related chemicals to cross over from the placenta. The umbilical cord, that mom-baby connection, grows along with baby. We’ve known this for decades. But it wasn’t until ultrasound that we realized that we can visualize what is going on in the womb via preborn pictures.

Visualizing The Connection Between Babies and Moms

Monitoring Baby During Stimulation of External Stimuli

The baby is surrounded with sounds inside the womb, everything from mom’s circulatory system with whooshing and heart beating to mom’s digestion processing the baby’s future nourishment. But the baby hears much more. Within several days of conception the baby is responding to music. By five and a half months that baby is responding to mom-filtered sunlight. The baby can sense unusual tactile stimulation by four months or so, even when protected by that uterus’ wall. The babe may be conceived and appear “tired” in the early days of gestation, actually sleeping most of the time after conception, but by birth time that same baby has the sleep patterns of a new born. Mom may get tired, but the baby’s food supply is steady (at mom’s expense) meaning the unborn baby has energy when mom doesn’t. Mom already knows that.

Turning Taste and Smell On

Baby’s food choices with likes and dislikes emerge in the womb. We know babies react to certain maternal foods by letting mom know that something is different by its little kick. We may be observing the baby’s chemical awareness system already operating. Preborns have been followed from six to nine months gestation age with respect to mom’s smoking. Babies were found to visibly “wince” when mom lit up, observation verified using 4D ultrasound technology.

See It

Now you can see it yourself with ultrasound.