Listen Your Baby's Heart Beats

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Your pregnancy period will be filled with anticipation for the birth of your infant. As soon as you overcome the morning sickness and mood swings, you will try to note the smallest movement inside your body. At this time hearing the fetal heart beat for the first time will be an exciting moment in any woman's life.

Fetal Heart beat starts after 22 days of conception. It can be detected as early as five weeks after the last menstrual period. The fetal heart beat can also be seen as a flickering in the chest as early as four weeks after conception. However these embryonic heart beats are too small to hear even with amplication.

The fetal heart beats will be more clear with a transvaginal ultrasound by 8 weeks of pregnancy. The Doppler can pick the embryonic heart beats within 9-12 weeks of pregnancy. The fetal heart beats will be more prominent after 20 weeks of pregnancy that you can listen them by using a stethoscope.

At many times the pregnant women do not have to rush to the hospitals to listen the fetal heart beats. You can use Doppler instrument or a stethoscope at a later stage to measure the fetal heart beats. The Doppler instrument bounces harmless sound waves off the fetal heart. A beating heart creates a change in the sound that can be picked by the receiver in the Doppler. The angle in which the Doppler instrument should be placed is depended on the period of pregnancy, position of your uterus and your body weight. By 12th week of pregnancy, you can listen to the fetal heart beats consistently with the help of a Doppler or amplifier.

You have to count the heart beats for a full one minute or 15 seconds and multiply it by four. Some advanced instruments provide the readout rates on these days. A normal fetal heart beat is between 12-160 per minute. Sometimes the Doppler picks up sounds from the mother's side of placenta and relays mother's heart beat instead of the fetus. A normal heart beat for the mother is under 100. If any confusion arises on the fetal heart beat; mother's pulse has to be compared with the same that is rated by the Doppler instrument.

There are some myths regarding the high/low and fast/slow fetal heart beats. With the misconceptions around, these features of heart beats never determine the sex of the baby. The sound varies in accordance with the sound control of the instrument as well as the distance and angle from the heart to the Doppler. In twin pregnancy, it will be difficult to determine the fetal heart beats at home since they are similar. In that case, you will have to seek your doctor's help to measure the same.

Fetal heart beats will give you constant reassurance about your baby's growth. There is no doubt that the steady beat of your baby's heart is one of the joys of pregnancy.