If you feel a light rhythmic twitching in your belly, it’s likely your baby is hiccupping. Although hiccups can be easily confused with some other small baby movements, babies do get hiccups while in utero.
Why does the baby hiccup while in the uterus?
Science has not yet figured this out. We don’t even know why adults hiccup. Hiccups are contractions of the diaphragm. Tt may be possible that hiccups in utero are linked with the development of the lungs.
Intrauterine hiccups were first described by the German gynecologist Mermann in 1887. Throughout the twentieth century, doctors and researchers have addressed this topic, calculated the number of twitches per minute, correlated them with the heart rate and the state of the baby after childbirth. But why some babies hiccup and how it affects their development is still unclear [1].
Hiccups are such small movements. Why do I feel it?
A sudden contraction of the diaphragm (this is hiccups) leads to a sharp displacement of the chest and abdomen of the fetus. Reacting to his unexpected movement in the space of the uterus, the child reflexively moves his arms and legs — it is difficult not to feel the whole set of movements [1].
How do I know if it’s a hiccup or kick?
It’s subjective: what mom considers a hiccup is a hiccup. In Australia, a large-scale study was carried out on this topic [2]. Women over 28 weeks of gestation were asked not to count, but to describe the baby's movements. If we discard all the lyrics and poetic images, it turns out that babies perform two basic movements: "pushing" and "hiccuping". That is, expectant mothers are usually distinguished by large movements of the body or limbs and small rhythmic ones. And whether the baby wiggles his palm or hiccups is actually not very important.
About 12 percent of mothers noted that movements become more frequent during or after meals [2]. Since hiccups in adults are often associated with overeating [3], we tend to transfer our ideas about cause and effect to the baby as well.
