Who's Pregnant? Hands UP!

When my wife and I first discovered she was pregnant with the Dragon we decided to share the news with our immediate families right away. The doctor's appointment that confirmed the pregnancy was at 1:00pm in Taiwan, which made it about 1:00am in Canada. My family would have to wait. My wife's family, however, could be notified immediately.

Iris immediately called her mother to notify her of the impending appearance of the Dragon. After the initial squeals and screams of excitement (along with a the Taiwanese requisite: "finally!") Iris's mom delivers this this golden nugget of superstition:

"Now, don't put your arms over your shoulders. It will make the umbilical cord wrap itself around the baby's neck and strangle it."

Right.

1. At that point in the pregnancy (4 weeks) The Dragon was only the size of a sharpened pencil tip and one could have wrapped the thinnest fishing wire around something that small.

2. By that logic, no woman in the history of this planet would have given birth to a live baby... Our Neolithic ancestors would have had a difficult time surviving if every female in the collective who was carrying a child was somehow expected to keep their hands firmly in the vicinity of their thighs. Gathering berries and nuts and hunting would have become difficult and I can't imagine a group of early homo sapiens surviving without the help of each member doing their part. Unless of course, this biological detriment was what caused our ancestors to come down from the trees in the first place (how do you climb a tree without raising your arms over your shoulders?

I mean can you imagine spending an entire nine months with your arms down? Never reaching up to get a glass from the cupboard. Never hailing a cab. Never adjusting the shower head. Never reaching for the box of Lucky Charms on the top shelf at the supermarket. And don't even get me started about obligations at work. How would pregnant women function with arms steadfastly at their sides? Imagine the lost revenue!

So where did this particularly restrictive piece of nonsense come from?

Well, this one is not restricted to Chinese/Taiwanese superstition. Turns out this one is prevalent in the west as well.

The truth is that the umbilical cord tangles itself around babies in about 1/3 of all pregnancies, especially among women whose fetus's move around a lot. Since 3/3 of all pregnant women raise their arms over their heads during pregnancy, one can imagine an old wife somewhere (probably Eastern Europe or China), upon the birth of a tangled baby noted that she had noticed the mother reaching up into the high cupboards for a wooden spoon prior to delivery. Given the respect bestowed upon medieval midwives (or Renaissance, or Victorian... I couldn't pinpoint the exact origin of this stupidity), respectable citizens started believing the myth along with other disciplines of quackery such as craniology and iridology.

Needless to say, Iris is (gasp!) to this day reaching for the cups on the high shelf (shock!) with nary a care in the world.

Well, duh.