Men's Pregnancy Guide: How to Understand Pregnancy Terms

The early parts of pregnancy are hard for men to understand and follow for different reasons that women may not realize. For one, without a man's body feeling any different when his wife or girlfriend is pregnant it is hard to feel that anything has changed. Also, men generally do not do as much reading or studying about pregnancy as men over the younger periods of their lives. For this reason it is important that men know some basic pregnancy terms to understand the process.

Gestational Age: There are two main different ways to quantify the time period that a woman is pregnant and this is one of the more popular ones. Gestational age refers to the age of the baby, but from the time that the mother started her last period. This age process will generally run two weeks older than the age of the baby as most women ovulate roughly two weeks after their period. Using gestational age a baby would be full term at 40 weeks.

Ovulatory Age: This is the age of your baby from the time of conception to the time of birth, meaning your baby would be roughly 38 weeks to be full term at birth. This is a much harder age to use because pinpointing the exact date of conception can be difficult to pin down. Unless there was the only the one time for intercourse during the ovulation period you are guessing. This is why gestational age has become more popular as there is a definite date to begin counting.

Lunar Months: It is sometimes hard for the technical people to get past the idea of a month sometimes being 28 days, sometimes 30 and sometimes 31. This makes it hard to say how many months pregnant you are as some months are longer than others. Due to this fact most doctors refer to "Lunar Months" as they are strictly going off of a 28 day (4, 7 day week) idea. Ignore the title of a month in this process and the general month is 28 days. There are ten 28 day periods in a pregnancy.

For men, the guide to pregnancy can be somewhat difficult as it is not something we are entirely familiar with in our younger days and we try to play catch up down the road. It is important for men to know these definitions as it will improve their understanding of the process that baby and mother must go through to get here.