The time of pregnancy is calculated from the first day of your last menstrual period (LMP), which is typically two weeks before conception actually occurs. This means the first two weeks of the 40-week count are before fertilization, during which your body prepares for ovulation and a new cycle begins
Does this make any sense? First they define pregnancy to start before conception. Then they go ahead laying out how the baby’s body is going to chage fast in the first week?! But there’s no body yet! You didn’t even have sex?
Of course it does.
Do you want to tell so many people the exact time when you banged her/got banged by him?
Well, maybe you want. Maybe you would even say that you can’t tell the day exactly because you did it every night for 3 weeks in a row. But not everybody can, or wants to, talk about these things, for all kinds of reasons.
Therefore a general way is neccessary for determining a date that serves as the begin date, for medical and legal purposes. And this one has worked best so far.
You bet, it might be going from not existing to existing, that is some change.
It is really awkward, but it is due to a practicality, it is very easy to pinpoint last menstruation, but very hard to know when conception happened.
And this new calculation adds some arbitrary weeks so they say a normal pregnancy will last up to 10 months. And then they say 10 months is late… Maybe this “article” is AI slop? I’m not an expert on pregnancy, but I’d say a lot in the text is more confusing than proper, practical math… At the end you’d be 9 months pregnant and depending on what paragraph from the article you’re referring to, the baby is due any day now… or it’s still 4 weeks to go, maybe even more if it’s late.
There is no “new calculation”. This is how medical professionals have calculated weeks of pregnancy for decades if not centuries. The reason is that it’s a lot more reliable than going by date of conception (which is not necessarily the date the parents had sex. Sperm can take days to reach the egg).
Source: I’ve spent 12 years writing accounting and quality management software for midwives.
You’re not wrong about knowing you’re not an expert.
None of this is new science
Sure, thanks for all the comments. Sometimes I write stuff before thinking it through. Guess my learning is some day I’ll have to look up the proper method of doing it. I still found the article to be very confusing. It’s clearly not meant for experts. But unless you’re one, the statements there seem to mix what happens after conception and the other timeline so I find it to be confusing to me. But I can read up on it and learn something as well.
Maybe it is not best explained, but the theory is accurate, another link: https://americanpregnancy.org/healthy-pregnancy/week-by-week/pregnancy-week-1-2/
Thanks, that one makes a bit more sense. And I mean the two things, the menstrual period and conception are linked… So there’s that 😆
Yes.
That’s not what’s happening. This is a statistical math problem and the last, reliably known variable is most likely the last period of the person before conception. That doesn’t mean they were pregnant before conception. If neither the date of the last period nor the date of conception are known, they use a different method, probably ultrasound picture comparisons, and add a lower number.