Life Contemplations

Making Babies. What a crazy concept. Think about it. Two people coming together, making love, and if it’s done at just the right time, the next thing you know, another human being begins to grow inside the woman. Weird, right? As amazing as the whole process is, what’s most fascinating to me, in my limited understanding of the whole thing, is the very beginning and the very end.

Now, without getting into the graphic details, in one “sitting”, a man delivers on average, over 200,000,000 – yes, that’s TWO HUNDRED MILLION – sperm into a woman. Now, I’m not much into research, but in the little bit that I did do, my understanding is that only about one thousand of those little guys make it into the fallopian tubes. Of those one thousand, only about 200 hundred ever find the coveted egg. So here’s the kind of stuff that I think about. How in the heck do those little guys know what they’re looking for? Unfortunately, most don’t make it to the prize, but they all start with one goal in “mind” – finding that egg. What is it inside of that microscopic oval guppy looking thing with a long tail that says, “there’s this gorgeous little egg in there, now go find it?”

Then, once those two hundred get there and start “attacking” the egg, another mind-blowing thing happens. In over 99% of the cases, once one gets in, the egg closes itself off with some kind of magic shield, and all the others are left to wonder about what might have been.

So many other amazing things happen from this moment until nine months down the road when a child is born. But what I want to focus on is another crazy thing that happens at the very end.

My wife and are were talking this morning about a high school friend of hers who breeds and raises very rare Red Labrador Retrievers. She was telling us that, in the first pregnancy, a female Red Lab can have up to 12 or 13 puppies. In thinking about that conversation this morning, my wife asked me, “how do they know when the last one is out, and what if one is stuck in there due to its position?” Well, I think we concluded, “I don’t know”, on the first question, but the second one kind of got me thinking again.

For puppies, I’m not sure that it matters if they come out head first or butt first. But for human babies, they must come out head first. This brings me back to the amazing thing that happens at the very end of a woman’s pregnancy – the baby freaking flips around and positions itself headfirst into the birth canal!!!! What the heck??? Now I don’t know enough about the process to say one way or the other if it’s the baby that does the positioning or the mom’s reproduction parts that positions the baby. Either way, how does that happen? How does the baby or the mom’s parts know that – “okay, it’s time to get ready to come out, so let’s go ahead and flip around.” Crazy, right?

Which, of course, brings up the question, does this all happen by chance, or is there a God that designed all of this amazing craziness?