Original subtitles

We're the same. Me and you. Well, kind of. In one big way. We were both born. And it's

not just us. All seven and a half billion of us living on planet Earth right now. We

all got exactly the same start in life. We all started as one cell big. What a miracle

is it that we are the complex beings we are that are capable of everything that we do.

More than 131 million humans are born each year. 250 every minute. While our understanding

of how babies develop and who can create life is evolving, the simple equation that begins

all human life remains. One sperm and one egg. That egg formed before the mother was

even born. An unbroken lineage connecting generations and defining what it means to

look at the history of life on Earth. We humans are relative newbies. Only a few hundred thousand

years have passed since our evolutionary ancestors created the first Homo sapiens. But in the last

50 years, we've witnessed a revolution in reproduction. Science is giving us extraordinary

new insights into the miracle of life from what's really happening inside the womb to unlocking the

secrets of attraction. And as the saying goes, it actually does take two to tango. You know,

in dancing, you see one plus one equals one. So when you dance together, you need one couple.

So not two people, it's one. My name is Ale. My name is Alex, and we're professional ballroom

dances in Los Angeles, California. When I first saw Alex, I remember I kind of like, who is that

guy? New guy in our dance studio. There was something what I liked about his body, about his

look, but I didn't like his dance partner. I remember I was like, he has to have a better

dance partner. I remember the time when I saw Aller, I would never forget that moment. When I

danced with her first time, I was quite overwhelmed with how I felt. Just the way how she moved on

the floor, how she smiled, how she expressed herself, then you get attracted to this. Though it

may feel like love at first sight, what you're really feeling in those first heady days is lust,

the engine of sexual desire and the fuel that's firing up your libido. Those are hormones.

We tend to think of hormones as just this sort of vague notion or women being moody,

but hormones have a specific definition. Hormones are packets of teeny tiny chemicals released from

one gland and targeted to another far away part of the body. Turns out, sex is literally on our

minds. Just above the brainstem are the pituitary gland in the hypothalamus. Those areas of the

brain send signals down to the ovaries and the testes to start pumping out more estrogen and

testosterone. Hormones that not only rev up your sex drive, they effectively shut down the logical

part of your brain. In other words, love literally makes us dumb. When I'm around Alex,

I'm always crazy. Every time when I touch you, when I smell him, I think I lose my mind. I can't

control myself. I have to run away from her sometimes, you know. She just attacks me and

I feel like I'm a gazelle and she's a tiger. When your hormones are raging or when they're too high

or too low, we're just talking teeny little nanograms difference up or down. Coming from

our brains, coming from our ovaries and our testes. These teeny weeny tiny chemicals that have such

huge impact all over the body on our growth, the way we think on our behavior. I'm just fascinated

by that. I'm attracted to them. I'm aroused by hormones, I can say. When humans move from feelings

of lust to attraction, a different set of hormones are released, dopamine and norepinephrine. This

cocktail of chemicals causes our hearts to race. Our palms to sweat, our cheeks to flush. We feel

more energetic, euphoric, giddy even. Attraction also reduces our serotonin levels, causing new

lovers to lose sleep and their taste for food. Our sense of smell, our sense of sight, our sense

of touch all have to do with the way our hormones are reacting in our brains. Precisely how, precisely

how much, we're just beginning to learn. When I'm close to Allah, there is a special scent, the smell

of maybe peaches, right? There are some kind of fruits that I want to eat. It's very sweet, very

delicious. Alex always smells good. He smells perfect. I don't even want him to take a shower.

Across the animal kingdom, bees and moths, elephants and mice, even fish attract others of

their species through scent. These creatures and many others secrete special chemical substances

called pheromones. Pheromones signal that the female of the species is feeling conorandy. Here's

the real deal on pheromones. If you're a female silkworm moth and you want to catch your guy,

a male silkworm moth, you can emit a pheromone. It will travel pretty far, hit some guy and he

will come back to you like a sex slave. He will mount you. We can't do that. Humans do not emit

pheromones. Most women I think can manipulate men, but it's through other ways other than pheromones.

Humans may not be slaves to scent like silkworm moths, but how a person smells does appear to

sway our choice of mates. One study found that in a blind test, women preferred the scent of a man

with a symmetrical face. Body symmetry, where the right and left sides are almost mirror images,

is considered a universal indicator of attractiveness. The moment she touches me,

I feel that going through my fingers to my heart. I love to dance with Alex. Such an amazing gift

that I can dance with someone who I really love. I'm a touchy person, so I need to touch. For me to

say it's not enough. In a lot of other social primates, touch is important for maintaining

relationships. For example, it's normal to groom each other. It's also something that can be done

sort of strategically to make alliances or to apologize. So it's clear that touch is important

that way. Brain scans show that a simple caress on the arm activates an area of the frontal lobe

that signals the coming reward. Similar touch patterns have also been shown to deactivate

regions of the brain related to stress. I have a surprise for you. Close your eyes, don't look.

How did you carry it here? It's so hot. We got married in 2006 in Russia. We have three

beautiful children, Daniel, Michael, and Angelina. Daniel is 13, Michael is eight, and Angelina is

turning six. Happy birthday. I cannot imagine my life without Alex. He is my everything. He is my

world. I cannot envision what I would do without her. When it comes to the human reproductive

system, it's a tale of two extremes. Males produce sperm, the smallest cell, while females produce

eggs, the largest cell in the human body. The structure of the egg is actually fascinating

because it's the only cell in the human body that we can visualize with the naked eye. The egg is

about the size of the tip of a pencil. When a baby girl is born, her ovaries already contain all the

eggs she will ever produce, somewhere around a million. By the time she hits puberty, a fraction

will remain. Of those, only about 400 eggs will mature and have even the slightest chance of being

fertilized. A male, on the other hand, produces exponentially more sperm. In a lifetime, men will

create 525 billion sperm. Each second they are creating about 1,500 sperm. It's a fascinating

number and means a lot of disposable sperm that we don't use. A sperm is a blob of DNA with a tail,

not nearly as complicated as the egg. Each ejaculate has about 200 million sperm. Most of them

never even make it close to the egg. Because most of them are losers, they swim the wrong way,

they dawdle. It's a pretty torturous journey to get to the egg.

Completing that journey takes speed and stamina. Recently, researchers discovered that sperm don't

actually move their tails back and forth like eels, as was commonly thought. Instead, they found that

sperm actually move more like playful otters, spiraling in a corkscrew motion in search of an egg.

The fascinating part about the sperm is that when a boy or a girl embryo are created, it is because

of the difference between sperm. One theory is male sperm swim faster, so they will get to the

egg faster, but they die sooner, whereas female sperm swim slower and are more persistent. They

will actually last longer. While the baby's gender may not be in the mother's control,

the choices she makes day-to-day during a pregnancy will have a profound effect on her baby for its

entire life. From what she eats to how much she moves, doctors are discovering new insights into

how nearly every decision has lasting impact.

When I heard stories of very powerful ladies who were pregnant still dancing, I think it changed

everything. My name is Jacqueline. Most people call me Jack. I'm 31 this year. I'm a dancer,

a dance instructor in Singapore.

The fact that I can be pregnant and still dance, it's like a dream to me.

Well, how's the pregnancy going on now?

No, great.

So we are seeing the baby now. I said, this is the hand. You see the fingers just waving at us?

Do you see that? That's the fingers that was just waving at us.

Jacqueline is nearing the halfway point in her pregnancy. During the second trimester,

her baby will triple in size and unique features will emerge from the pattern of its hair

to its individual footprints and fingerprints.

In the second trimester of pregnancy, the baby will go from being about 2.5 to 3 centimeters

and grow almost up to several inches. Though Jacqueline's baby will grow rapidly in the next

few weeks, its most impressive growth spurt happened at the start of her pregnancy.

If that pace continued, her baby would weigh 3,000 pounds at birth.

It's an extraordinary fact that at one point each of us as people were only one cell big.

Those cells divided in two and four and eight and then started to specialize as we developed as

humans. Cells can collaborate with one another to create very complex beings like who we are

as humans. They're really the unsung heroes of the body. So you can see that the baby is in the

amniotic sac. This is the placenta. The baby is taking nutrients through the absorption of the

placenta. The placenta is an organ that allowed us to grow offspring within our bodies to a much

greater level of development than what you see in other mammals.

What this means is that the offspring protected for a longer period of time and it's also sort

of efficiently nourished and maintained and it's buffered from the outside world to a certain

extent by the mom. This is clearly a strategy that became quite successful because in most

areas of the world, placental mammals have seemingly outcompeted marsupials.

The placenta is a fascinating organ. It's the only temporary organ we have in the human body.

The placenta allows for the formation of the umbilical cord.

The baby is able to get oxygen from mom and get rid of waste and carbon dioxide

all because of the umbilical cord. It's almost like the amniotic scuba gear.

But that's not all. The placenta serves as a critical buffer between mom and fetus.

If Jacqueline's blood were to mix with her babies, her body would attack it as an outside

invader. But inside the placenta, a microscopically thin barrier of cells separates the two blood

supplies. So we can see that some of the features are growing. Can you see the eyes?

Oh. Eyes are growing here. That's the nose.

The baby is really active. Can you see that? The legs are kicking. Did you drink coffee today?

You didn't? No, I touched coffee. Okay. Since the last time we've seen the baby.

Moms are often advised to reduce caffeine intake during pregnancy because it passes

through the placenta and can cause the baby's heart to beat even faster. Though smaller than

a thumbnail, the fetal heart beats twice as fast as the average adult heart, pumping an astonishing

100 pints of blood per day. So let's listen to the heartbeat. This is the classical moment.

So the heartbeat is about 150.

Yeah, the heartbeat is very strong.

For expectant parents, few things in life top hearing your baby's heartbeat for the first time.

That rush of excitement may even help make up for some of the side effects Jacqueline and others

experience during pregnancy. From nausea and swollen ankles to bloating and constipation,

carrying a baby isn't always a picnic.

Do you find that there's any changes to your taste buds at this moment?

Lemon. Yeah, lemon just makes me puke. I see. Yeah, I don't know why.

Who used to like lemon when when you were not pregnant?

I like sour taste, like really sour. I love it. Yeah, so I was quite shocked.

Changing taste buds is a common side effect of pregnancy.

Medically, the condition is known as discusia.

While the cause of discusia is not fully understood, rising hormone levels are often blamed.

I'm Chinese, so I love Chinese spicy food. Like my best friend cheers me up when I'm down.

Compared to before, I don't eat spicy food as often because it also causes some discomfort,

like bloating, you know, especially in the first trimester.

Are you sure what my baby is tasting

inside? If my baby could taste everything that I ate, it would be quite a ride.

At this point, we really want to make sure that mom is maintaining her nutrition and her ability

to rest because the placenta needs to be able to continue to give oxygen to the baby.

We know that the baby's five senses have been really starting to be honed, especially taste.

What a pregnant woman eats and drinks not only provides nourishment,

it may also influence her child's food preferences later in life.

A baby develops taste buds in utero as it gulps down a yellowish liquid called amniotic fluid.

Think of it as a kind of first food, a complex mixture of chemicals

shown to contain both tastes and smells.

They've done studies with amniotic fluid where they had women eat certain foods that were

considered to be a little bit more potent like garlic. And when they did smell tests,

they noticed that people were able to recognize the smell of flavors like garlic.

But it's not only Jacqueline's daily diet that directly impacts her fetus.

Research shows how much she moves can be just as influential.

I've been dancing since I was nine years old, but of course during pregnancy,

I kind of have to buffer that explosiveness.

I would like to think that every time when I move, the baby is moving as well.

Sometimes when I feel something in my womb, I don't know if it's actually the baby.

Most women won't start feeling their baby's move until around the 16th week of their pregnancy.

These flutters are called quickening. That motion is critical to its development.

Leg movement during the embryonic stage helps certain cells know if they're to become bone or cartilage.

At our studio and company here, this is the first time that somebody is pregnant.

So we're all like getting used to having a pregnant woman in the studio.

In Singapore, it's not that common. People that are pregnant being still active.

Everybody's like really careful with me.

If I sleep just a little, everybody's like take it easy, rest.

I secretly feel like the baby enjoys movement.

It's not just mom's behavior that so influences the health of an unborn baby.

From what we eat to the stress we feel, science shows us that the life experience of even the

grandparents affect their offspring all the way down to the cellular level.

We're talking about epigenetics. Epigenetics is essentially the genetics

that we are born with but the environment changing them. Meaning if you took the exact

same embryo, a twin embryo that had the same egg and sperm genetics and you implanted it into

two different women's uteri or one woman at two different times of her life,

the expression or the epigenetics of that particular embryo would alter

based on so many different aspects that we can't even completely account for anymore.

Think about smoking. A woman who smokes is not only affecting her own health,

she's affecting her unborn child and her unborn grandchildren because of the effect of the smoking

on the reproductive cells, not just on the fetus, but on the fetal reproductive cells.

That's an epigenetic phenomena that's three generations deep.

From lifestyle choices to environmental factors, epigenetic changes passed down

through generations are shown to affect the fetal reproductive cells of females and males.

Researchers are now zeroing in on whether this type of epigenetic inheritance may be to blame

for a rise in infertility rates, particularly among men.

It's estimated that as many as one in seven couples trying to get pregnant experience infertility.

Seeing Levi as a result of the trials and tribulations that we've been trying to

bring him into this world, it's amazing. It's inexplicable because this is everything you've

ever wanted. My name is Jenny Pierre. I am a wife, a mother of one, and soon to be two.

When you're young, you don't really think about children. But when I met my husband, it was like,

oh my God, I'm so in love. I want to see what we can make. It was just a no-brainer that, okay,

once we start trying, you know, as soon as I'm off birth control, it's going to get into it,

and boom, it's going to happen like in two seconds. Good job, Levi. Nope, that was not the case for us.

Birthing as a metaphor to me is an example of what life really is like for everyone. I tell

patients throughout the entire process, we cannot control what's going to happen. But if the end

result gives us the yield that we want, which is a happy, healthy mother and baby,

then it's worth everything, which is exactly how I would view life.

We made the decision to start trying in 2015. After six months, you're looking at each other like,

what is going on? Why are we not, you know, getting pregnant? Let's go see someone.

I knew from the start, I was told by my doctor that I had about two to three fibroids.

And she was like, it's not anything you need to worry about until it becomes a problem.

Fibroids, like Jenny's, are non-cancerous tumors that grow inside and outside the uterine walls.

They're made of muscle and fibrous tissue. No one knows exactly why fibroids occur.

But it's estimated that up to 80% of women are affected by them. That's 26 million people in the

U.S. alone. In Jenny's case, she had 15 fibroids removed, one the size of a tennis ball.

We thought my fibroids was the big hoopla, like the big to-do,

but Paul gets a sperm analysis and he has a low sperm count.

I was really surprised and couldn't believe it. Come to find out that I had a very good celly.

Infertility is actually a really big issue nowadays. A third of infertility within couples

will be because of the man, a third will be because of the woman, and a third will be unexplained.

In the man, there can be issues with the number of sperm or with the structure of the sperm.

This can be due to things that are anatomical, like something called varicoseal.

Varicoseal is a condition in which one testicle, often the left, is enlarged due to issues with

blood supply. It's kind of like a varicose vein and affects sperm formation, movement, and function.

Paul was able to have the problem corrected through surgery. He also took medication to

boost his testosterone levels and jumpstart sperm production. So now what? My doctor said,

until we've run out of resources or options, we're going to keep going. We called our doctor,

hey, we've decided that we want to go straight to IVF. In vitro fertilization is an amazing

scientific, technological entity that now doctors are being able to perform all the time.

Essentially, they will give the woman a lot of hormones that are typically injected,

a hormone called FSH, follicle stimulating hormone, predominantly.

This will stimulate the woman's ovary to release many eggs.

I don't want to say it was scary, but you know, you go to the doctor and you come back home with

all these prescriptions, and next thing you know, you get this box, you know, it arrives at your

house filled with needles. My hands were like, you know, sweaty and shaky. I think it was like

three in the morning and three at night, and it was just like back to back, back to back, back to

back. A lot of shots. A lot of shots. A lot of shots. Under ultrasound guidance through her vagina,

they will actually extract the eggs, and then the lab technicians who have the sperm available,

the egg and the sperm, then create the embryo within the lab. The embryo can either be frozen

or can then be placed back into the woman's uterus to implant and create a healthy pregnancy.

Good morning. We are on our way to get pregnant.

Baby, whether you're a boy or a girl, we will love you unconditionally.

The moment that they transferred the embryo, you have to wait two weeks

in order to know if you have tested positive for your pregnancy.

It's torture for those two-week time frames.

I went to the doctor, did a blood test, and she came back. She was just like, listen,

you're like pregnant, pregnant. We're pregnant. Okay, okay, let me stop eating myself.

And we're just over the moon at this point, and so excited to just start planning.

They've proven the house and changing doorknobs.

Cannot deal. And they always tell you not to get too excited because

you're not at the 12-week mark. For those 12 weeks, you become so paranoid in a way.

Each year that a woman ages, her chance of getting pregnant

does go down a small amount, and the chance of a miscarriage does go up a small amount.

But at no point does it jump exponentially. The likelihood of a miscarriage in pregnancies that

we recognize, meaning a woman has a positive pregnancy test, she's determined to be pregnant,

is estimated at anywhere from 20 to 25 percent. So one in about four or five pregnancies will

end in miscarriage. That number is probably higher when you include a lot of unrecognized

or very early pregnancies. So that's estimated to be potentially as high as 50 percent of all

pregnancies ending in loss. Most of the time when there is a miscarriage, we can comfort

the patient by saying it is the chromosomes that were abnormal, and that's not something

that's likely to recur in the next pregnancy. It's been a while since I've done this.

And I don't remember either. So this is not as quick as I thought it was going to be,

although we have practice. Nothing is ready. The third trimester, your anxiety is at a thousand.

How do I get ready for this baby? And am I ready for this baby?

After 26 weeks or so, we consider the third trimester. The baby is growing about half a

pound a week at that point until what we consider the due date.

The due date really is an estimate. Look at us. Teamworks.

And those last four weeks of pregnancy, a lot of that time is just getting the baby nice and fat

and a little extra sturdy to come out. That's why babies that might be born like a week early or a

few days or two weeks early, they might be thinner, but they're healthy. They're fully developed.

But you felt him move, right? You felt the brother move? Yeah. Okay, yeah.

In my IVF journey, one of the hardest things was finding someone that looked like me that I could

relate to. I've taken it upon myself to be the poster child in a way. Hey girl, what's going on?

I am fine. I have so many questions. Where do we start? Today I have my friend Elizabeth coming

over. She is quite interested in the IVF journey and I'm hoping to share my experience with her.

I wanted to see a black woman that said, these are the difficulties that I'm dealing with.

I have a whole protocol sheet for you to look at. Hey guys, white people are not the only people that

do IVF. Asians are not the only ones that do IVF. Those are the only two faces that I saw

waving the flag and saying, hey guys, I did IVF and I'm proud. This takes you through what your

days would look like and how many shots you need to give yourselves per day. Because again,

like I said, it's a lot. When we came out with our story, the feedback was just ridiculous.

We, especially in the black community, need to stop making it a taboo subject. Just say, hey guys,

there is no shame in this. I had fibroids. Hey, my husband had low sperm count as a black man.

I'm really hoping that I encourage some black women or black families really.

Everything that it took to get here is worth it. Oh yeah, it's worth it. It's so worth it.

Jenny and Paul are nearing the finish line of her pregnancy.

When it's time for her to give birth, it's her uterus that will be tapped to do the heavy lifting

of labor. There's actually controversy about what the strongest muscle in the body is.

Some people will say the jaw or the tongue, and while they are incredibly strong, many would

argue that those ones are utilized every day, whereas the uterus is an amazing muscle and organ.

Because it's all of a sudden, without being exercised, asked to change in shape and grow

and stretch to several times its normal size, which no other muscular organ does in our body.

And then, without, again, experience, it's asked to contract several times throughout

the course of labor, asking the cervix then to open. The cervix is the muscle at the bottom

of the uterus that acts as a gateway to the birth canal. Problem is, this passageway is about an

inch too small for a baby's head, so nature came up with an evolutionary solution.

During labor and delivery, babies are preparing for this massive Houdini exit

from a seemingly small space going through a cervix.

Now, we look at the human skull, the baby's skull, and sometimes we think it's one bone,

but newborn babies have a special trick for fitting through a cervical canal.

The bone is actually five bones connected by sutures, or kind of like expansion joints,

so that that baby's skull can actually literally smish through a cervical canal.

During the birthing process, the brain actually also gets squeezed, they realize,

and that can actually alter what happens when the baby is born throughout the baby's entire lifetime.

It may sound scary, but the fact that the baby's brain gets squeezed during labor

is actually a good thing. Early research suggests that the journey through the birth canal provides

a kind of healthy stress that appears to have a positive effect on how certain genes behave down

the road. These genes are linked to immune responses, weight control, and some so-called

tumor suppressor genes, and that's not the only benefit of labor. We also know that babies born

vaginally get coated with a lot of the healthy germs that are in the birth canal or the mother's

vagina as the baby's coming out. So babies do get some of their mother's immune system at birth

as they're then developing their own.

I started out as a doula about five years ago. A doula is a emotional and physical support person

who works with families during pregnancy as well as postpartum after they have a baby.

To be a companion and a witness to the miracle of birth, to be allowed in that space and invited

into that space is such an honor. It's the best work that anybody could ever imagine.

My name is Mack Brydom and I'm a doula and a family guide.

Every birth that I've attended has been unique.

There's no one way that's right to birth. It's really unique to each individual and their

preferences. Ultimately the goal is that the baby comes out. Pregnancy never lasts forever

and that that bond between the birthing parent and the baby can begin.

Some of my favorite clients have been the queer and trans families that I've supported.

Bearing witness to their journey really inspired me to pursue that path of becoming a parent myself.

The human pattern of childbirth is really kind of unique because unlike even our closest

living relatives like chimpanzees, human moms typically seek help. This is what is called

obligate midwifery. What that means is that it's normal in humans to have assistance at the time

of birth and this pattern is probably reflective of the fact that we have very difficult childbirth.

It usually takes us longer. The process of labor is more dangerous for humans.

Labor is probably one of the most physical endurance tests that any woman has ever had to

go through. The labor process itself can take anywhere from you know one or two hours in a

very fast case up to 24, 36, even longer. Right as the baby is about to come out there is that moment

where I think everyone in the room is shocked that a head this big can come out of an orifice

that looks so much smaller. Hi you guys. Hey how's it going? Good thank you how are you? We're good.

We just started getting all the nursery out of yesterday. Yeah we're excited.

I work from home which is really wonderful as a new parent. Great so our time today is really

just all about how to take care of your newborn and your first-time parents.

Becoming a parent is a really pivotal time in everybody's life. Let's talk a little bit about

newborn appearance. This is my daughter. This is Rowan. I'm so in love with her that I just have to

make sure that she gets little moments of glory in here. Rowan's four months old and the first

four months of her life have been a roller coaster ride but a really a really fun one for the most

part. I think we had a little bit of a leg up because I am a doula and I have some of the book

smarts. On the first day of life baby's tummy is this big but you know she's a baby. She's

unpredictable. There have been days that have been really challenging and there have been moments

that have been really stressful. Ultimately she's an amazing little person and I can't wait to see

who she becomes. Gee I wonder what's in here? As a doula supporting families I thought that I knew

what to expect through pregnancy and birth. Oh hello. Welcome to our nursery. But ultimately

once you go through it on your own and have that physical experience of gestating a baby and

birthing a baby. We have cute photos and more cute photos. I have so much more respect and awe for the

families that I support. And a cute daddy. I'm a trans man. I was assigned female at birth.

I have a uterus and ovaries and the parts to be able to gestate a pregnancy.

At the same time be true to myself as the man that I am.

Before I met my spouse I didn't have a strong sense that I wanted to carry a baby.

Once I met her and started to imagine our life together that's when the idea of being a

gestational dad and carrying my baby felt like a dream that I could make a reality. Oh yeah.

A big piece of that was that my spouse did not want to carry a pregnancy but she has always

wanted to be a mom and I've always wanted to be a dad. Our process of getting pregnant was pretty

long. We realized okay we have half the equation to make a baby. I joke that we have an abundance

of uteri in our relationship. We asked a friend of ours to be our sperm donor and then from there

I stopped taking hormones. So I was taking testosterone for about seven years. Waited

for a cycle to return which took a little while and then we started doing intrauterine inseminations.

It's moving its arms. Eventually after several attempts several more months going by

we finally did conceive. I had a planned cesarean birth. For me as a trans man the idea of giving

birth vaginally felt pretty incompatible with my sense of my body and myself.

In my work as a doula I know that cesarean rates in the US especially are much higher than they

need to be. There are a lot of cesareans that are performed unnecessarily but in my case it felt like

the right choice. Whether they're born through a c-section or vaginal birth when a newborn first

emerges from the womb their body systems are hard at work adjusting to life on the outside.

The transition from fetus to newborn involves the most complex series of physiological adaptations

a human will experience in its lifetime. When babies are in utero their lungs are filled with

fluid and there are certain channels in the cardiovascular system which are designed to

bypass their lungs because they get their oxygen from the umbilical cord. But once babies leave the

womb and everything changes the atmospheric pressure in their new world triggers a big change

in their heart and lungs. They attempt to rid all the fluid out of their lungs and the

cardiovascular system immediately undergoes changes to accommodate this. Their lungs slowly

fill with air and they're able to now live breathe and thrive in their new environment.

Before Rowan was born we got to the hospital really early in the morning

and a few hours later she was there.

The actual birth was incredible it was not something I'd ever seen before.

It was intense it was beautiful seeing her little face made it all worth it.

You know it made every ache and pain and every time I puked during pregnancy and during birth

it made it all worth it because I got to see my little person be born.

In the moments after birth a newborn will experience hunger, thirst, cold for the first

time ever. They'll be completely reliant on those around them for survival.

But they do have a secret weapon to help them adjust to life outside the womb.

Vernix Casiosa.

This white waxy cream protected their skin from amniotic fluid inside the womb.

It contains a complex mix of proteins, lipids, amino acids, and antimicrobial compounds.

It's believed to be unique to the human species.

Outside the womb Vernix Casiosa helps prevent heat loss and research suggests that its scent

may help trigger neural connections in the newborn's brain that are needed for breastfeed.

For us the idea of feeding Rowan breast milk was important. I have had top surgery and so I don't

have the ability to feed baby from my body. We've been really privileged to have people in our life

who are already lactating and have pumped that milk and donated that milk to us to feed Rowan.

Babies who are fed breast milk benefit from nearly 200 different sugars that the milk contains.

Those sugars feed the microbes that will, over time, help the baby develop a healthy digestive

system. Breast milk, the third most common ingredient in it, is something called an HMO,

a human milk oligosaccharide. And human milk oligosaccharides are completely indigestible by

babies. So why is a third most common ingredient in breast milk something that a baby can't even

digest? It's because it's not there to feed the baby, it's there to feed the baby,

it's there to feed the baby's gut bacteria and help those bacteria to repel staph and other

potentially dangerous bacteria. So there's real symbiosis there between what's going on in the

breast milk and what's going on in the baby's gut. Babies who don't breastfeed can also benefit from

human milk oligosaccharide as synthetic versions are added to some brands of infant formula.

All done. Nice work.

Rowan really completes our family. When she was born I feel like I already knew her.

I felt her kick inside of me and it's a really big gift that so many dads don't get to have.

The assumption is that women want to have babies and men can't. Our family turned that

expectation on its head. Now that Rowan is here it just doesn't really matter how we got here.

The experience has been so empowering because it's basically the ultimate definition of father as

protector and I feel like I've played that role from the time that Rowan was growing inside of me.

So regardless of where we live in the world one thing that unifies all of us is that we were all

born. We all came into this world in much the same way. Why am I emotional? Come on.

It's just birth. I knew scientifically there was no question that we all started as one cell big

and I knew that consciousness is something that develops and yet nothing could prepare me

for living through the experience of incubating a new human. My little baby wondering

when was she starting to think? Is her personality starting to develop?

The developing brain is fascinating. From the first cells laid down during fetal development,

the potential of the human brain is vast. The capacity to learn, to feel and empathize with

others. Humanity is locked into those hundred million cells. With each generation the human

species evolves. While it's hard to say any one given baby is going to be born perfect,

I do believe that we have this ability to really encourage children to move and grow and evolve

into beings that are far better than we were. We really are an insanely fascinating species.

You strip away everything, privilege, socio-economics, race, religion. We literally are the same

organisms. We go through the exact same physiologic struggles and if that doesn't

unify people then I have no idea what's going to.

To order Human The World Within on DVD, visit shoppbs.org or call 1-800-PLAY-PBS.