In the room with Holly:
I had the absolute privilege of meeting a kind-hearted, God-loving young woman for the first time in my office this week. This young woman was facing an unplanned pregnancy and expressed quite a bit of fear and anxiety, along with quite a bit of morning sickness, which didn’t help the situation. She came in with her mother, who I discovered was a pediatric nurse, caring for infants and children. We offered her a limited OB ultrasound to confirm her pregnancy was in the uterus, measure the baby’s heart rate, and give her an estimated gestation based on the baby’s size. Before her ultrasound, I asked for her permission to show a short, 5-minute video produced by the Endowment for Human Development. I felt like she might benefit from seeing all the changes that were going on INSIDE her body so that she better understood what she was going through. She and her mother agreed, and we watched “Your Life Before Birth”, which can be found at EHD.org. I watched as the young woman smiled and shed tears of joy as she saw all the growth and development that had quickly taken place in such a short amount of time. The heart began beating at 4 ½ weeks, just about the time she had taken her first pregnancy test. The brain had formed and was already active with brain waves at 6 weeks, which leads to reflexes and movement of the hands and feet. This beautiful and precious baby had every organ in place at 8 weeks and was playfully moving its hands up to its face. It’s the miracle of life and each and every one of us started the exact same way. Our DNA was determined the moment the sperm penetrated the egg to combine 23+23 chromosomes = 46 human chromosomes and the start of our life. The only difference between you then and you now, is time. We are simply on a time continuum from the start until the day we draw our last breath.
After the video ended, we all took a deep breath, sharing in our moment of awe about God’s beautiful creation. I showed them baby models that are accurate to gestational size so they could further understand fetal development. The young woman’s mother, the pediatric nurse, said, “I had no idea that all of that happened so quickly once conception occurred. I thought that you could get an abortion up to 8 weeks because nothing was really going in the uterus until then.” I reassured her that the intrauterine fetal development video that we just watched was not only factual and scientifically accurate, but also, we were about to confirm everything with the ultrasound where she would see her 11–12-week-old grandbaby.
And that, we did! She and this new little momma were able to see that precious baby, fully formed, playful and actively kicking and moving its hands and feet. The baby was seen putting its hands up to its mouth, then forehead, and then to its ears. The legs were curled up until the baby stretched out fully extending its legs and feet as if to stand up inside the mother’s womb. It was all captured with our eyes and with printed images for her to keep. The perfect reminder that her baby’s life was well underway and that all her nausea and vomiting was not for nothing. Today was good medicine for this scared young momma. It was also good medicine for her mother who was now equipped with the TRUTH about the beauty and miracle of life that begins at the very moment of conception.
If You Know, You Know!
