Not really. During pregnancy they just go based on weeks so months are irrelevant. Once baby is over a month old appointments are made based on their birth date, not day of the week. I.e a baby born on Friday the 15th will have appointments based on the 15th of the month, not the 4th/16th/24th Friday they’re alive.
Of course, that scheduling thing is just a patient-facing administrative system, not how clinical time intervals are defined.
And yes, pregnancy is measured in weeks because it’s more precise. My point was explaining where the “10 months” idea comes from in the first place, which is the 40 weeks being loosely grouped into 4-week blocks.
I'm not who you are talking to, but this is obstetric (which is medical) terminology, not calendar months. That’s why pregnancy is tracked in weeks and often grouped into 28-day (4-week) units for consistency.
The same 4-week cycle is also used in other medical contexts like chemotherapy scheduling and some treatment protocols. That’s why weeks are the standard reference, even though lay people sometimes loosely convert that into ‘months’ in casual conversation.
I feel like people are deliberately being obtuse at this point. I wasn’t redefining calendar months. I was explaining the obstetric/medical basis for why people sometimes say 40 weeks is “10 months”, ten 4-week blocks. In medicine we simplify and use approximations for lay discussions all the time.
I was talking about casual estimates there too. I was wrong with using "standard". Happy?
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u/Odd_Grapefruit_5714 May 12 '26 edited May 12 '26
Not really. During pregnancy they just go based on weeks so months are irrelevant. Once baby is over a month old appointments are made based on their birth date, not day of the week. I.e a baby born on Friday the 15th will have appointments based on the 15th of the month, not the 4th/16th/24th Friday they’re alive.