Where do babies come from?

Everyone has a set of instructions inside them that says how to make you, it’s called a genome. Babies are made by mixing a mummy’s and daddy’s genomes together. The baby then grows in an egg inside the mummy, who has a baby growing sack (a uterus) especially for this purpose.

I don’t think that there is any other question that strikes so much fear into the hearts of parents. Not because they do not know (you don’t get to become a parent without knowing) but because many consider it to be a delicate subject. I, therefore, will approach the subject as delicately as I possibly can.

Myth busting

Adults tell children many imaginative accounts of where babies come from. Some involve an avian postal service or mystical horticulture, but the only one that has any relation to the truth is that babies come from mummies bellies.

To be specific, babies come from a mummy’s uterus. All woman have a uterus and this is essentially a baby growing sack within the body. Men do not have one and this is one of the reasons why daddies can’t have babies.

Human eggs

Everybody know that chickens lay egg and that chicks hatch out of eggs, and it’s exactly the same setup for us. The only difference is that human eggs do not have a hard shell. We don’t need a hard shell because the egg is laid into the uterus, rather than outside the body. The uterus then acts like the shell protecting the egg. Also, by keeping the egg inside the body this means that we don’t have to spend lots of time sitting on the egg to keep it warm like the poor chicken does.

So what is an egg? Eggs contain as much energy as the baby needs to develop. This is a lot for a chicken as there is no way for them to get food into the hard shelled egg (it is this food source that we eat when we eat an egg, but don’t worry; the eggs that we eat never contained a chick). Human eggs don’t need much as mothers can continue to feed the egg throughout its development because it stays inside the body. The other thing that is inside the egg is the instruction manual on how to make a baby. This instruction manual comes in the form of a molecule called DNA. DNA stands for Deoxyribonucleic acid. The mouthful is why everyone calls it DNA. Everyone has unique DNA (except identical twins) which makes everyone unique (identical twins find other ways to be unique).

Making unique

The reason that everyone is unique is because of the way that DNA is mixed within the egg. When a woman makes an egg it only contains half of her DNA and each egg contains a different mix of that half. If DNA is like letters in the instruction manual, then genes are like chapters. Each person has around 25,000 chapters in their instruction manual which gives lots of options of bits to pick out to make up that half.

The other half of the information comes from the daddy. This means that everyone is half of their mummy and half of their daddy and this is how everyone ends up being unique. The chicken eggs that we eat do not contain any daddy DNA, this is why there is no chick.

The delicate bit

The only question that remains is how does the daddy DNA get into the egg? Well, if you look at the title of this article you will see that this is outside of our scope. All I will say is that if you already know then you don’t need me to tell you; and if you don’t know, then you don’t need to know yet. We are animals (like any other) and one of the benefits of being an animal is that there are something that you don’t need to be taught. For example, nobody taught you how to breathe; you just know how to. Equally, nobody taught you how to walk; it’s just something that you figured out for yourself and this falls into the same category. When you need to know, your body will make things more clear to you than I could ever possibly manage by writing it down here.

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Matilda’s Lab is written to help explain complex science to children. Effort is made to keep the content accurate but sometimes it is necessary to oversimplify things. However, if anything that is factually wrong, please get in touch so that a correction can be made.