In some ways, girls and boys are quite similar on the outside. After all, they have the same number of arms, legs, ears and noses. One of the biggest differences between women and men (apart from the bald patch you sometimes see on men!) is that women have breasts and men don’t. Also, men have penises while women don’t. Inside our bodies, women and men also have some bits the same and some different. They both have hearts to pump blood round the body.
They both have lungs to breathe with. But inside a woman’s tummy area is something called a womb. It’s usually about the size of a chicken’s egg, but it can blow up like a balloon. It’s hollow and it has a soft lining. Men don’t have wombs.
A baby comes from a woman’s egg and a man’s seed. Together, they grow into a baby, and that’s complicated. Babies need to get all their food from their mummies before they are born. Inside the womb, they can attach to their mummy and get everything they need to grow from her body.
Babies also need to be protected. When babies are first born, they can’t do much except feed, cry and sleep. But by the time they’re born they are nine months old. Before that they can’t breathe on their own.
When a woman is pregnant, the baby in her womb floats in a fluid and doesn’t need to breathe. But it does need to grow. Because the womb is so stretchy, the baby can grow from the size of a pea to the size of four bags of sugar before he or she needs to come out.
Of course, the differences don’t stop when the baby is born. When a woman has had a baby, her breasts make milk, which has everything the baby needs to help it grow. Daddies are great at many things, but they can’t have babies!