Today, it's often thought that fulfilling the desire to have a child requires the same commitment and difficulty as earning a Master's degree. Thanks to stopping contraceptive methods and knowing various ways to identify the ovulation period, many couples convince themselves they can plan the birth of a child for the moment they feel most ready to welcome them — or at least within the limits allowed by the biological clock.
But can pregnancy really be planned, or is it an illusion? Isn't it too often forgotten that both the meeting of an egg and a sperm cell, and the successful continuation or interruption of a pregnancy, depend on many factors independent of one's own will, beyond one's control?
The voice of women
Many pregnant women express the feeling of being lived by their condition without having any ability to influence it. Some testimonies gathered over the years: «Our first child was planned and came right away; we've been trying for the second one for months and it's not happening» — «I discovered I was pregnant in my fifth month: I hadn't noticed anything before, since I was used to having long delays in my period» — «We practiced withdrawal for years and I never got pregnant: after two months on the pill I was pregnant» — «When, after years, we had resigned ourselves to living without children… the baby arrived» — «My husband's test results left little hope: a few weeks after starting the adoption process I realized I was pregnant».
The changes a birth brings
Once it's clear that planning is only presumed, even a pregnancy that begins at the desired moment doesn't always make life easier for parents after the child is born. While it may seem fairly simple to find the time for a pregnancy — which is limited to nine months and in most cases proceeds physiologically without disrupting a woman's pace of life — it is far harder to imagine how many, and what kind of, changes a child's birth will bring to one's own existence.
This happens because people often don't realize that the emotional investment and affective availability devoted to raising a child limit, at least temporarily, a woman's ability to dedicate herself with the same intensity and continuity to the commitments she used to have (work, social life, sports). Added to this is the exhaustion caused by the disruption of schedules and the feeling of no longer being in control of one's own time, since it is now dictated by the baby's rhythms.
Failing to take these physiological but inevitable changes into account, trying to work around them as if nothing had changed, doesn't help overcome the difficulties — it actually amplifies them, putting the balance of the woman, the man, and the couple at risk.
The biological reality: the trophoblast
The feeling of not belonging to one's own pregnancy reflects a biological reality. The fertilized egg travels down to the uterus, where it settles by digging a nest into the wall. The contact between egg and uterus is mediated by the trophoblast, from which the placenta will develop — the organ that, throughout the pregnancy, acts as the go-between for mother and child.
The placenta connects, without mixing them, maternal and fetal blood and, through specialized mechanisms, allows exchanges to occur appropriately for both. Pregnancy, although it involves a container and its content, proceeds in parallel for the pregnant woman and for the embryo/fetus, who live without direct contact thanks to the mediation of an organ that belongs to neither of them.