Hey Giaan, that’s a super interesting question! Lots of kids just like you wonder how babies are made. It’s really important to understand because making babies is how people, and animals too, continue to exist!
Understanding Our Bodies: The Starting Point
To begin to understand how a baby is made, we need to talk about two special things: sperm from a person with a penis and testes (we often call them men), and eggs from a person with a uterus and ovaries (we often call them women). It’s helpful to know the names for these body parts. You can check out these pictures and these pictures to see them.
Sometimes, people are born with bodies that are a bit different, and that’s perfectly normal. Also, how someone feels inside as a man, woman, or neither, might not always match the body parts they were born with.
Where Sperm and Eggs Come From: Puberty Explained
When you get a little older, your body will start to change – this is called puberty. It usually happens when you’re in late primary school or early high school. Puberty is when bodies start to be able to make babies.
Sperm are tiny, tiny things – you can only see them with a microscope! They look a bit like tadpoles. Men’s bodies start making sperm in their testes after puberty. Sperm comes out in a liquid called semen. Once puberty starts, a man’s body can make millions of sperm every day!
Eggs are kept in women’s ovaries. After puberty, usually, one egg is released from the ovaries each month. Eggs are bigger than sperm, but still small – about the size of a grain of sand.
How Sperm Meets Egg: The Magic of Conception
So, how do sperm and egg get together to make a baby? This is called conception or fertilization.
The most common way for conception to happen is when a man and a woman have sex. This is when a man’s penis goes into a woman’s vagina, and semen comes out. Sperm from the semen then travel up inside the vagina. If a sperm meets an egg on its journey, they can join together. This joining is the very start of a baby! At this early stage, it’s actually called an embryo.
The embryo then travels to the uterus, which is a special place inside a woman’s body where a baby can grow safely for about nine months.
Other Ways Babies Can Be Made: Expanding Families
Families are all different! Some children have two mums. In these families, if they want to have a baby, they might need help. Sometimes they ask a man to be a sperm donor. This means he gives his sperm to help them have a baby. A doctor then carefully puts the sperm into one of the mum’s uteruses.
Another way is called IVF, which stands for in-vitro-fertilisation. For IVF, doctors take sperm from a man and eggs from a woman and mix them together in a special dish outside of the body. If an egg gets fertilized and becomes an embryo, the doctor then puts the embryo into the woman’s uterus. After that, the embryo grows into a baby just like if conception happened in the usual way.
Growing and Being Born: From Embryo to Baby
Once the sperm and egg join to make an embryo, this little embryo attaches itself to the wall of the uterus. Then, something amazing called the placenta grows. The placenta is like a super important helper that gives the growing baby all the food and everything else it needs from the mother’s body.
After about nine months of growing in the uterus, the baby is ready to be born! The muscles of the mum’s uterus start to push the baby out through the vagina. This is called vaginal birth.
Sometimes, it’s safer for the baby to be born in a different way. If this happens, doctors can do an operation called a caesarean or c-section. In a c-section, the doctor makes a cut in the mum’s tummy and takes the baby out that way. Mums get special medicine so they don’t feel pain during a c-section.
Still Curious? Keep Asking Questions!
It’s normal to have lots more questions about how babies are made! Some kids want to know every little detail, and others just want to know a little bit.
If you have more questions, the best thing to do is talk to your mum, dad, or another grown-up you trust, like a teacher. There are also helpful resources like this one that grown-ups can look at to help them answer your questions in a way that’s easy for you to understand.
