Why is the Date of Conception Hidden?
Musings on US Mother's Day
A family picture from 2017
During my recent travels in automobiles, on airplanes, on ferries, taxis and tuk tuks I’ve sometimes been reading substack articles especially those regarding the basis of the eugenicist movement. The idea widely embraced in elite circles is that we have to kill a lot of non elites and prevent the birth of more non elites in order to save the world. Whether it is dressed up as concerns about overpopulation or running out of resources does not matter. I was thinking about a personal issue which seems like it was ginned up by some think tank related to that. To wit: when did doctors stop dating pregnancy to the time of conception?
I asked my mother about this. “Well when I was pregnant they asked when my last period had started. Then they just added two weeks to it.”
“So they didn’t date the pregnancy as starting the day of your last menstrual period?” I asked her.
“No. That would be goofy.” She responded. I told her that that is how they do it now.
US Mother’s Day is actually my least favorite personal holiday. After me and the father of my older girl split up he had her in school in another state and it was difficult to visit her on that Sunday. I got to endure some tedious guilt trip about how Jasmine was abandoned and she was the only kid at school whose mother had not been there for some event.
The next year in 2012 I flew out of Los Angeles to Phuket to be with my new Thai boyfriend Oh. He had been persistent with his daily video Skype calls to me that if I came back to Thailand he was all about being with me and having children, getting married and coming to the USA. I flew out of America around April 29, after visiting my daughter Jasmine and of course being around my ex Joe by default. My period started around the same time as I left the USA. I remember pads being an issue on the long flight.
I became pregnant with my younger daughter Eliza the very first cycle me and Oh tried. So my now husband Oh insisted on coming to my prenatal appointments. The first ultrasound was a disaster for him, though thankfully not because there appeared to be anything wrong with the baby’s development or the pregnancy. But I was clearly listed on the sonogram as being 11 weeks pregnant and at the top some obscure LMP date said, in Oh’s eyes, that I had conceived the baby right when I was seeing my older daughter and visiting with my ex in the USA.
“You have Kuhn Joe’s baby!” Oh accused me angrily that night. “I see on the paper!” He threw the first ultrasound photo at me.
“Why would I do that?” I questioned back. “Me and Kuhn Joe finished a long time!” The reasons why I might have possibly had a fling with a blond haired, blue eyed, well to do American man and then tried to pass the baby off as the child of a poor Thai man were inconceivable to me.
“My friend they warning me farang women they very loose! They have sex everybody!” Oh yelled.
This distrustful energy festered for far longer than it needed to. Oh went with me to subsequent ultrasounds and everytime I asked them to actually tell me the DATE OF CONCEPTION. Not this stupid last menstrual period crap. It took me months before one young Thai intern quietly said “I think 12 May.” She whispered it as though it was this dark forbidden secret that she was not supposed to tell us. That had been US Mother’s Day that year, as it is this one. I had a happy memory of watching the 40 Year Old Virgin with Oh in English language with Thai subtitles and drinking some Sato wine and then some romantic sexy things happened.
So happy Conception Day Eliza. Needless to say by the time my younger daughter was born all doubts were erased. My older daughter was supposedly the spitting image of me. My younger daughter meanwhile was the spitting image of Oh, if he had been a girl, anyways.
I am sure they came up with ostensible reasons for hiding the date of conception. I’ve heard health care workers tell me that women remember when their period started better than they do the sex (that’s depressing). Medical types have also told me that a woman’s ovulation cycles can be wonky (but her periods aren’t also wonky?). This is exactly why conception should be more studied instead of less.
I’m going to list all of the reasons I can think of why putting a woman’s date of pregnancy as her last menstrual period date is absolutely retarded, in no particular order:
For the pro choice people out there, especially the majority of them who might be squeamish about late trimester abortions but who are sympathetic regarding early first trimester ones, the pregnancy is statistically dated as two weeks along before the woman even gets pregnant. For a woman with uneven cycles who is not on top of things she might not be able to confirm a pregnancy until she is near the end of her first trimester due to this.
For couples trying to conceive dating the pregnancy as starting at the date of the last menstrual period is going to intentially hide all sorts of valuable information. The partners might find out that she ovulates on uneven cycles or that certain practices, whether it’s a change in sexual positions or routine or diet or mental and psychological visualization have helped. That information is all hidden, along with potentially having a romantic memory of something very special created together.
For a woman who has multiple sexual partners in a short period of time finding out the time of conception might allow her to pinpoint who the father of the child is.
For religious types conception would be the paramount moment when a new life is formed. So you’re going to make that two weeks before it likely happened to undermine it?
For metaphysical types the actual sexual experience which led to the creation of life would carry a great deal of weight. Yet somehow women can’t even remember it as well as they do their periods.
This dating of conception to last menstrual period can deeply undermine the relationship and trust built between two sexual partners. How many men were in situations similar to Oh’s who did not speak about their doubts out loud? Some ultrasound pictures come back and there’s an LMP listed in the upper right hand corner and it says the baby is 12 or 19 weeks along and it occurs to the guy that wait a minute he was on a business trip during that time. How many relationships got wrecked over this? This one is nefarious.
I could go on with this, but I suppose you get the point. Hiding the date of conception seems like an intentional ploy by the Club of Rome to obscure the origins of life and destroy the family unit. It paints the creation of a child as a random accident. It inadvertantly paints women as wanton and forgetful. How many partners were in Oh’s position who did not even speak out loud about it?
What do you all think? Greetings from Bangkok and well, happy Conception Day…
Not specifically dating the event of conception does seem like a prostitute's way of 'blaming whoever is most profitable.'
This might be part of a wider cultural phenomenon where people have come to value certainty so much that they prefer to be certainly wrong than vaguely right.
I remember weather forecasts that used to have temperature intervals; nowadays, most forecasters would just spew out a single figure.
And don't get me started on economic forecasts.