GESTATION, UTERO-GESTATION. In Medical Jurisprudence. The time during which a &Male, who has conceived, carries the embryo or fcetus haler uterus.
This directly involves the duration of pregnancy, questions concerning •which most frequently arise in cases of contested legitimacy. The descent of property and peerage may he made entirely depend eat upon the settlement of this question.
2. That which is termed the usual period of pregnancy is ten lunar months, forty weeks, two hundred and eighty days, equal to about nine calendar months and one week. One question that has here been much dis cussed is whether the period of gestation has a fixed limit, or is capable of being con tracted or protracted beyond the usual term. Many have claimed that the laws of nature on this subject are immutable, and that the fcetus, at a fixed period, has received all the nourishment of which it is susceptible from the mother, and becomes as it were a foreign body. Its expulsion is, therefore, a physical necessity. Others claim, and with stronger reasons, that as all the functions of the human body that have been carefully observed are variable, and sometimes within, wide limits, and as many observations and experiments in reference to the cow and horse have established the fact that in the period of utero-gestation there is more va riation with them than in the human spe cies, there should remain no doubt that this period in the latter is always liable to varia tion.
3. There are some women to whom it is pe culiar always to have the normal time of deli very anticipated by two three weeks, so that they never go beyond the end of the thirty seventh or thirty-eighth week, for several pregnancies in succession. Montgomery, Preg. 264. So, also, there are many cases establishing the fact that the usual period is sometimes exceeded by one, two, or more weeks, the limits of which it is difficult or impossible to determine. Lord Coke seems inclined to adopt a peremptory rule that forty weeks is the longest illme allowed by law for gestation. Coke, Litt. 123 b.
But although the law of some countries pre scribes the time from conception within which the child must be born to be legitimate, that of England and America fixes no precise limit, but admits the possibility of the birth's occur ring previous or subsequent to the usual time. The following are cases in which this ques tion will be found discussed. 3 Brown, Ch. 349 ; Gardner Peerage case, Le Merchant Re port.; Croke Jac. 686 ; 7 Hazard, Register of Pennsylvania, 363. See PRECNANCY.