No Dorks, Six Weeks is Not Enough Time to Know You’re Pregnant

Take it from a previously pregnant person, who is obsessive about tracking everything.

Photo by JESHOOTS.COM on Unsplash

My friend posted on Instagram, bemoaning the new Texas law creating a modern-day, internet-driven Stasi. The post was mild, given that abortion and the new law is such a divisive issue: it simply said that Texas hadn’t banned abortions, but rather had banned safe abortions.

I was about to scroll past it, and then a comment caught my eye: Give me a break, six weeks is enough time to know you’re pregnant. The comment was from a woman, so I banged my head on my desk for a bit, and then convinced myself to not respond. This would have also been an alarming comment from a man, but women are supposed to know…something about this.

I’m proud of myself for not getting into an Instagram war, but it’s been a few days and I still can’t stop thinking about how fucking stupid that comment was. So I’m taking to my keyboard to explain that no, six weeks is not in fact enough time to know that you’re pregnant. If I have to read a stupid comment like that again, I’m going full-tilt introvert and just never leaving the house. (Which sounds pretty great right about now, but I assume that someday I would like to go see the butterfly exhibit at the Natural History Museum or something).

To that stupid Instagram commenter, everyone else equally stupid, and to the people who never thought about it much but are curious (I’m not mad at this last group, to be clear): the medical community measures the length of a pregnancy from the first day of your last period. This means that the measure of a pregnancy starts on a date when you are not actually pregnant. If the first day of your last period is July 15, and you conceive on August 1, congratulations, you are two weeks pregnant on August 1. Let me repeat: on the day you conceive, you are now two weeks pregnant if your last period started two weeks ago. You are three weeks pregnant if your last period started three weeks ago.

Everyone with me so far? Probably not, so I’ll use myself as an example. I’m not wild about writing about my own abortion, but I’ll do almost anything not to read a comment so goddamned asinine again. Desperate times.