Is it true that Jackie Chan's mother carried him for 12 months?

A common story is that the famous actor's mother was pregnant with him for 12 months. We decided to check whether this amazing fact from the star’s biography is true.

About Jackie Chan spent in my womb mothers incredible 12 months and weighed at birth more than 5 kg, regularly write Media. This amazing fact often appears and in various biographies actor. Users forums constantly are given questionhow is this Maybe, while in the same branches you can find comments, talking about long pregnancies, which the authors of the replicas observed from friends and acquaintances.

Jackie Chan talks about his mother's unusually long pregnancy told himself back in an interview in 2010. British TV presenter Jonathan Ross asked the actor if it was true that he was in the womb for 12 months. “Yeah, I was just a huge kid, and my parents were too poor to pay the doctors,” Chan said.

In order to understand how plausible such reports are, we must first understand what science knows about the length of human pregnancy. She's normal lasts about ten lunar months, each of which is equal to 28 days, that is, 280 days, or 40 weeks. Since the calendar month usually differs from the lunar month (except for February), then, in terms of the calendar we are used to, bearing a child takes a little more than nine months. Doctors count these 280 days from the first day of the last cycle, calculating the so-called obstetric gestational age. Since implantation of a fertilized egg is happening on average, five to seven days after sexual intercourse itself, and ovulation on average occurs on the 14th day of the cycle, the obstetric period is longer than the real one (that is, the one that the woman herself can calculate if she knows exactly when the sexual intercourse occurred that led to pregnancy) by two weeks.

It is based on obstetric weeks that doctors calculate the expected date of birth (EDD). However, only 4% of babies are born on this day. By statistics, in 70% of first-time mothers, births most often occur at the 41st and 42nd weeks of gestation, while the second and subsequent ones usually occur a little earlier than the PDR, at the 38th or 39th week. Pregnancy that did not end in childbirth at 42 weeks called post-term, the birth is late, and the child is overripe. Post-term pregnancy is a fairly common problem: statistics Center for Obstetrics, Gynecology and Perinatology of the Ministry of Health of the Russian Federation, from 0.8 to 10% of women encounter it.

May lead to post-maturity bring a number of factors: late puberty of the expectant mother and menstrual dysfunction, various endocrine disorders and kidney and liver diseases, complications of pregnancy itself. Also, this pathology is more often meets in women whose first birth occurred over the age of 30 and who are pregnant with a boy. Postmaturity is dangerous for the life of both mother and fetus. In particular, in overmature infants there is a delay in the growth and development of subcutaneous fat, disturbances in the metabolism of glucose and bilirubin, staining of the nails, skin and umbilical cord with meconium (original feces), and when amniotic fluid with meconium is swallowed, meconium aspiration can begin, threatening severe respiratory failure. Therefore, during postterm pregnancy, doctors strongly recommend that pregnant women be hospitalized and consider artificial induction of labor. 

Of the factors contributing to post-term pregnancy, only one can be reliably identified in Jackie Chan and his mother - the male sex of the fetus. This was not the actor's first pregnancy There is older sisters - Chan’s mother’s first birth happened exactly before she was 30 years old. There is no information in open sources about the woman’s concomitant diseases and the characteristics of the pregnancy.

Publications about Jackie Chan's gestation period usually talk about either 12 months or almost 12 months (let's assume that in the second case we mean 11 months and two or three weeks). Thus, the future actor had to be in the womb from 50 to 52 weeks, or at least 350 days. In fact, science has documented pregnancies that last even longer than this period. For example, in 1955, Moroccan Zahra Aboutalib gave birth at home for 48 hours and then went to the hospital for a caesarean section. However, after seeing the death of one of the women in labor there, the woman fled from the hospital. A few days later, the labor pains stopped, but the child was not born. Only 46 years later, when doctors suspected Abutalib had an ovarian tumor, the patient decided to trust the doctors. They found a fully formed, but literally petrified baby in her abdominal cavity. Scientifically, such calcified remains of unborn children are called lithopedions. Zahra Abutalib is not the only woman who has been pregnant for so long; science knows of at least 330 cases of lithopedion formation. However, in all these cases with long-term pregnancies, the child did not survive.

There are two candidates for the title of women with the longest pregnancy that resulted in the birth of a live child. First - American Bula Hunter, who carried a child for 375 days, that is, more than 12 months. In confirmation of the incredibly long gestation, the girl’s doctors provided her pregnancy test taken in March 1944 (her last menstrual period was in February), as well as evidence of abnormal fetal development. Only six months later did the expectant mother feel the first tremors, while this usually occurs at 16–18 weeks. Doctors discovered the fetal heartbeat in September, and with normal development they should have recorded it in July. As a result, after postponing the pregnancy for almost 100 days, Hunter gave birth to a healthy girl. Her attending physician suggests that for some reason the development of the fetus stopped and then continued again. However, skeptics believe that it is possible that Hunter suffered an early miscarriage and did not notice it, and then became pregnant again. The doctors who observed the woman reject this hypothesis.

The second candidate is Chinese woman Wang Shi, who allegedly carried the child for 17 months. About her wrote numerous Media, including on Russian language. The woman stated that she became pregnant in February 2015, the child was due in November, but instead was born the following August. Unlike Hunter, Wang Shi was not seen by doctors for most of her pregnancy, and after making a sensational statement, refused undergo an ultrasound scan to confirm your words. Therefore, her record is not seriously considered by doctors.

Along with an undetected miscarriage and a new pregnancy, a woman’s irregular cycle can lead to an incorrect calculation of the gestational age. For example, she considers the first day of the last cycle to be January 1, therefore, she expects the baby to appear in mid-September. And although she didn't get her period in February, she's still not pregnant. Fertilization and conception occurred later, at the end of March, and the woman mistook the menstruation that occurred before this for bleeding during placenta implantation (up to the 20th week, 20–30% of women collide with bleeding from the vagina). Thus, in September she will begin to expect labor, and in October she will decide that her pregnancy has already lasted more than nine months. Having given birth in December, on time, to a child conceived at the end of March, she can consider that she has been carrying him for almost 12 months. 

This explanation for the supposedly 12-month pregnancy looks much more logical, especially considering that Jackie Chan’s family was poor and could hardly afford regular examinations by doctors. Moreover, the actor’s mother performed a caesarean section - most likely, if the doctors had evidence of such a long pregnancy for the patient, they would have shared an interesting case with colleagues and the scientific community, but such publications could not be found.

But the actor’s enormous weight at birth—5.4 kg—is by no means a record. Macrosomia The weight of the fetus is considered to be over 4 kg. Today, 8–10% of children are born with this pathology. Large fruit - most often indication to a caesarean section, however some women, first of all themselves different with outstanding physical parameters, choose natural childbirth and cope with it. Jackie Chan is by no means a record holder for birth weight. Corresponding entry in the Guinness Book of Records belongs Italian Carmelina Fedele and her son, whose birth weight was 10.2 kg.

Thus, most likely, Jackie Chan's mother incorrectly calculated the date of her birth and therefore was sincerely mistaken in believing that she had been carrying her son for 12 months. Otherwise, the doctor who performed her caesarean section would have reported such a rare medical phenomenon to his colleagues and scientific journals.

Cover image: Film.ru

Most likely not true

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