Question: How do you see how the unborn baby is changing?

Lucy Green answered on 10 Jun 2018:

What do YOU notice about a woman who is expecting a baby? You can tell just from how her tummy gets really big that the unborn baby is growth at quite a rate!! It starts as a single cell smaller than a grain of salt and grows to the size of a watermelon (ish!).

Years ago, unborn babies used to be looked at by X-Ray – a bit dangerous though! These days ultrasound scans are done. These can even show you a 3-D picture and can show blook flowing through the baby’s major blood vessels. From the scans you can measure things like the size of the baby’s head and how long the baby is. Heart scans can tell you how the heart is working. This way you can track the growth and development of the baby as the pregnancy goes on.

If you do this in 100’s of babies – measure growth and blood flow – you can see if there are ways they link to what the mum is eating, if she has a bit too much fatty tissue in her body or perhaps even if she doesn’t have enough vitamin D.