This morning as we were standing on the platform waiting for our train to arrive, I looked over at my wife and realised quite how pregnant she looks now.
To be fair, it does make a difference what clothes she's wearing, but even so, it won't be long before they're irrelevant and she'll just be Baby-Bump Lady (special powers - rubbing her belly and remarking how she's feeling sore). You may think that I shouldn't need to look over and suddenly realise how much bigger the bump is, but it's one of those things that because I see it every day, I'm less aware of the progress.
One of the other signs of her increasing bump is that K___ has bought and fitted a 'Bump Belt' from Clippasafe. This is a small rectangle of cloth with two long straps that connect and tighten the bump belt behind the seat, and two smaller lengths of seatbelt webbing that protrude at forty-five degrees to each of the front corners. The ends of these bits of webbing are doubled over and fastened with Velcro. You sit on the rectangle and then pull your seatbelt over. The top bit sits as normal in the middle of the chest, but the lap belt is pulled down and pushed into the open loops of the Bump Belt. This means the passenger's own weight holds the bottom belt under the bump, not over it. Given that a car crash can propel a person forward with a stress of five tons, you can see why you don't really really want the main restraint over the baby!
Loughborough University calculated the risks unborn babies face in a car crash. When a mother suffers serious injuries in a crash, it's estimated that there's a 40 to 50 per cent chance of losing your baby. Even 'slight' - I have to assume there's some official definition of what is a severe injury ('leg hanging on by a thread = severe; minor bruising to the knee - slight') - injuries carry up to a 5% risk of losing the baby. Wearing a seatbelt reduces the risk of injury by up to 70%, which kind of makes it a no brainer.
More here.
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