A mother from Arizona, in the United States, has given birth to a giant 6.4 kg (14.1 pound) baby who was born two weeks earlier than expected, at 38 weeks gestation. Added to this curiosity is the fact that Finnley, as the newborn is called, came into the world after the couple suffered 19 gestational losses.
Cary and Tim Patonai, who are already parents to two other children, have been looking for another baby for some time. The mother had two miscarriages in the last year, in addition to the 17 miscarriages she suffered between her first child, who is now ten years old and the second, who is two years old.
It is what is known as secondary infertility, when the couple already has a child but has difficulty having another.
“Two of those miscarriages were sets of twins, so it was very difficult,” the mother told Fox News.
If the pregnancy goes to term, Finnley could weigh 7.5 kilos at birth
Finnley, now 10 days old, weighed 6.4 kilos at birth, twice what an average newborn weighs. He is also tall, at 61 centimeters, when an average newborn is 10 centimeters shorter.
He was also born two weeks earlier than expected. Doctors estimate that if Finnley had arrived on his due date, he would have weighed approximately 7.5 kilos .
Already in pregnancy they could see that the baby they were expecting was large, but they estimated that its weight would be somewhat lower.
Needless to say, the doctors who delivered the delivery were impressed. The obstetrician, who has been in his profession for 27 years, said it is the largest baby he has ever seen born.
Upon seeing him, they realized that the clothes they had bought for him would no longer fit and that they should skip size 1 diapers.
The parents told the local media that their other two children had also been born with a lot of weight; one weighing more than five kilos and the other weighing almost four kilos.
Macrosomic Babies
These giant babies, who are born much heavier than expected, are known as macrosomic babies .
According to the report ‘High-weight newborn’ from the Neonatal Unit of the Pediatrics Service of the Basurto Hospital (Bilbao), it is often referred to as macrosomia when it is calculated that the weight of the baby at birth will be greater than the 90th percentile or greater than four kilos of weight . It is considered that it is from 4.5 kilos of weight when the complications increase significantly.
An estimated five percent of babies are born above this 90th percentile, but not all are considered macrosomic, nor will they all need special measures. Among the risk factors we find genetic factors, that the parents are also large, and maternal conditions such as gestational diabetes or mothers over 30 years of age.
But although his size is very striking, Finnley is not the largest baby that has been born. The Guinness World Record for the largest baby to survive infancy belongs to a boy who was born weighing 10.34 kilograms in Aversa, Italy, in 1955. In 2009, an Indonesian woman gave birth to a baby weighing 8.7 kilos at birth.
VÃa | Today Parents
In Babies and more | Calendar of measurements and weight of the fetus during pregnancy, week by week
