Does a normal 38 weeks pregnancy start from conception or implantation?
Sperm can apparently live up to 7 days inside a woman. Does a 38 week pregnancy occur anytime from these 7 days
or does a 38 week pregnancy start from implantation which happens something like 12 days after conception?
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In my opinion, the pregnancy starts from conception.
A pregnancy is 40 weeks, starting from the first day of your last period, and this is done to eliminate the confusion about when conception or implantation occurred. Usually conception is about two weeks after your last period, and implantation is shortly after that, so the answer to your question is conception, but the real answer to when a pregnancy starts is the first day of your last period.
An average pregnancy is considered to be 40 weeks counted from the first day of the last menstrual period. It is more common to count from the first day of the last menstrual period because date of conception is not easily determined. Even using an ovulation predictor kit or monitoring basal body temperature and cervical mucous, you can’t know for sure when ovulation occurred. At best you will come up with a likely time frame to ovulate. In addition to the unknown factor of when the egg is released from the ovary, you also have the variable of how long sperm live inside a woman. Sperm do have potential to live inside a woman for several days, possibly as long as 6-7 days if conditions are optimal. After the egg has released from the ovary it remains viable for 12-24 hours, possibly as long as 48 hours. You can not, with all certainity, say that conception takes place the day you have sex because of these factors. If you somehow know when conception took place, such as in the cases of fertility treatment procedures that fertilize the egg in a laboratory setting, than the average gestational period is considered to be 266 days or 38 weeks. When the fertilized egg implants in the uterus has no bearing on the length of the pregnancy. Even using 38 or 40 weeks is only an average. A good example to explain this is with the case of my cousin and his wife. They tried for 10 years to have a baby. When they had saved enough money they went through fertility treatments and discovered my cousin’s sperm were damaged. They harvested her eggs and used donor sperm. They knew the exact moment of conception simply because it happened right there in the lab in front of the technicians. It took several tries, but finally one of the fertilized eggs implanted. They gave them a due date 266 days after the egg had been fertilized in the lab. In theory you would think that baby would have been born exactly on the due date. She wasn’t. Their beautiful baby girl was born 9 days before it. Everything is based on averages. There is no exact science when it comes to predicting exactly when a baby might arrive. In regards to implantation, it varies considerably, but on average, the length of time it takes for the fertilized egg to implant in the uterus is 7-10 days. This, again, is nearly impossible to determine when it actually occurs.