Includes index.

In How Life Begins, science journalist Chris Vaughan provides you with a fascinating glimpse of fetal development through the advancement of medical technology and interviews with leading researchers. He goes beyond the usual information in books for expectant parents. For those of you who want to know more than how fast the fetus is growing, when it will start to move, and how much more weight Mommy is going to gain, here is a month-by-month guide to what your new baby is seeing, hearing, dreaming about, and how it's accomplishing the miracle of preparing to be human.

As Chris Vaughan says in his prologue, "Life in the womb is a journey that we have all taken but forgotten, a period that links our present to the whole history of life on earth, a time that shapes our lives and perceptions into adulthood." What this book is about, and what scientists are discovering, was penned in a prescient phrase by the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge: "The history of man for the nine months preceding his birth would probably be far more interesting, and contain events of greater moment, than all the three score and ten years that follow it." How Life Begins focuses on the experience of the embryo and fetus, and provides an entertaining and informative guide to the long and fascinating journey from single cell to plump and bright-eyed baby.

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