Monitor the Heartbeat of Your Baby at the Fetal Stage – When and How?

Are you a worried parent-to-be? Are you running a high-risk pregnancy? Is your upcoming baby at any physical risk? Are you an expecting mother in mid-thirties or an age more than that? Would you simply love to have even deeper attachment than what you have today – however impossible that might sound right now – with your unborn little one? If the answer to any of the above is “yes”, then a fetal heart monitor is what you are looking for.

What is a fetal heart monitor? It is an electrically operated device used to monitor and report the heartbeats of an unborn baby from its mother’s womb. The monitor would sense the heartbeats and count them. It would then report the number of heartbeats per minute. The more advanced monitors would also show the electrical signals generated by the heart of the fetus sleeping inside the mother. The older Doppler monitors would not measure the per-minute beatings, but would clearly render the sound for you to listen. In such a case, you would need to listen to the sound and then use your watch to find out how many time you could hear the heart beating in a twenty seconds time frame Then you would multiply that by three to find the actual number of heartbeats per minute.

Being able to monitor the heartbeats of an unborn baby is extremely necessary for health grounds. And it is more so if there is any level of uncertainty in context of the baby’s health. This is applicable for high risk pregnancies where anything can go wrong any time and also if the unborn baby has already experienced a health hazard once. In these cases you just cannot afford to take a risk. Setting up a heart monitor to monitor the conditions of your unborn baby is almost mandatory in such a situation.

The same applies for women having a pregnancy at a relatively latter stage in their lives. Since the female reproductive system becomes weaker once a woman crosses thirty five years of age, it is wise to keep the unborn baby under constant supervision if the expecting mother has reached this age. A fetal heart monitor helps tremendously in such pregnancies.

How does one setup the fetal heart monitor to get the reports? The monitor needs to be placed in the region just above the pubic bone of the expecting mother. This will put the device directly above the baby and hence would be best poised to catch the heartbeats of the baby. You may need to adjust to an extent before you are able to hear it. It is suggested not to try this until the pregnancy reaches the thirteenth week.

Keep monitoring frequently if you are aware of any potential hazards, and if you ever notice any deviation from the expected behavior of the heartbeats, bring that immediately to the notice of the doctor.