No, being born in the seventh month is much riskier. The rule is that the more time the baby spends inside the mother’s belly, the more chances he has to be healthy. “In the seventh month of pregnancy, almost all the organs of the fetus are ready, but they have not yet matured enough. The structures of the little body are still very fragile. It is only in the following two months that blood vessels and tissues become stronger and the baby gains weight”, says obstetrician Débora Steinman, from Hospital Albert Einstein, in São Paulo. What may have fueled this popular belief is the fact that some children born in the seventh month of mothers suffering from high blood pressure or diabetes have more developed lungs than babies born in the eighth month of a normal pregnancy. It is that the existence of these diseases in the mother causes a lack of oxygen for the fetus. In these cases, the organism understands the lack of oxygen as a warning that the baby may need to be ready to breathe before the expected nine months.
Therefore, it manufactures the so-called surfactant substance earlier, responsible for developing the lungs and preparing the child to breathe. “In a normal pregnancy, as the surfactant is only produced in the passage to the ninth month, the lungs have not yet matured in the eighth month. But in premature births of hypertensive or diabetic mothers, the early release of the substance speeds up the development of these organs even in the seventh month”, says obstetrician Sang Choon Sha, from the Brazilian Society of Fetal Medicine.