Eight hours of labor done in one second.
"The baby is approximately nine months early!"
— Vision, WandaVision
A pregnancy that goes from conception to birth at an extremely fast rate, often caused by an external (possibly supernatural) factor.
In Science Fiction, this is often because of some other hugely advanced race knocks up a different one, possibly a human, and the hybrid offspring gestates at an enormously fast rate, either normal for the other species, and grows to term in a matter of days. Or, if it's created like a robot, the creation is sudden and wasn't announced in previous episodes, and the whole process takes a very short time.
If it's meant to be a normal human pregnancy, then it's simply a garden-variety case of Pregnancy Does Not Work That Way. This can happen when Writers Cannot Do Math, or when they're using Comic-Book Time or Webcomic Time and lose track of what the hell is supposed to be happening.
Tends to go hand in hand with Fetus Terrible. Contrast with Longest Pregnancy Ever. Not to be confused with Instant Birth: Just Add Labor!, which is where the woman's pregnancy takes the usual forty weeks but her labor and (especially) delivery are implausibly quick. Also, please do not confuse this with Instant Home Delivery, which has nothing to do with birth but may apply to the Delivery Stork.
Examples:
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Advertising
- This commercial
depicts several women spotting a cute baby, causing them all to grow big pregnant bellies as a result.
- In this advert for Steri Stumpie, a young boy is telling his mother the urban legend which states that if a mother and son drink Steri Stumpie at the same time it will cause them both to get ten years younger. The mother doesn't seem to buy it, but they both take a slurp simultaneously regardless. Mom looks in the mirror and notices that she's grown more youthful so she turns around to check on her son, only for him to be gone and his drink to be spilled on the floor. Looking down, she notices that she now has a big pregnancy bump, to which she responds with a sigh.
Anime & Manga
- Subverted in Berserk. Casca gives birth to a demonic Fetus Terrible mere days after being raped by Femto, leading Guts to believe this trope is in play and attempt to kill it. Skull Knight corrects him: the creature is not Femto's child, but Guts', conceived some time before. The demonic rape mutated the unborn child and caused something between a premature birth and a miscarriage. It's unclear which because it's unclear whether the child is "alive" in the conventional sense.
- In Dead Leaves, Retro and Pandy have sex, and she is visibly pregnant roughly ten minutes later. Not long after that, the baby just kind of...comes out of its own volition, but ages super fast and dies in short order.
- Dragon Ball Super has this happen with Bulla, who is magically delivered by Whis in order to ensure that her father, Vegeta, who wanted to be present for her birth, could participate in an extremely important tournament. The anime plays it relatively tastefully, with Bulma lying in a room and the baby being carefully delivered. In the manga, it's played as a gag, with the baby abruptly popping out while everyone else is eating. Bulma isn't really bothered in either version, although given her status as the universe's single biggest Weirdness Magnet, it's not too surprising.
- Fullmetal Alchemist (2003): Writers Cannot Do Math variation. There was enough time for Rose to become pregnant and give birth, even though only a few months are shown to have passed since Ed and Al last saw her during their initial visit to Liore.
- Fetus Terrible Yuca Collabel from Immortal Rain resurrects himself in a pregnancy that lasts little more than two months...and is already in the form of a prepubescent boy when he bursts out of his mother's stomach ala Aliens.
- Played with in Koucha Ouji, there was a pregnancy that lasted not even a month. It's because the whole thing happened in the Tea World where time flows about 10 times slower compared to the human world while the mother was a human so her body's own time was still bounded to its true course. So technically while the event was extremely fast to the Tea World and its natives, the pregnancy itself actually processed on normal speed from a human's perspective.
- H-manga Spunky Knight XXX has Phaia, being experimented on by a mad scientist-wizard, forcibly brought from "a few weeks and not even aware she's pregnant" to "full-term delivery" in a matter of seconds. She's rather surprised, but after she offs the wizard, she makes sure to retrieve her baby before she escapes.
- H-manga Koumi-Jima ~Shuu 7 De Umeru Mesu-tachi~ takes place on an island where, depending on how compatible a man's genes are, women can give birth anywhere from one week to a minimum of 24 hours after getting pregnant.
Comic Books
- Atari Force: The Dark Destroyer in the second comic book series pulls this on a backwater planet creature that he enters into to become born in the form of Martin Champion, speeding up the process to the point where it ends up killing the mother.
- The Avengers: Happened to Ms. Marvel in a fairly Squick-inducing storyline in The Avengers (1963) #200. She gave birth to a fast-aging baby who grew up into his own father and took her as a wife. note
- Great Ten: Mother of Champions entire super power is her ability to go from conception to birth in three days. She also gives birth to litters of kids with Super-Strength and who age ten years for every day they're alive. If she mates with one of her teammates, the offspring have other superpowers, as well — though in the case of the radioactive Socialist Red Guardsman's children, the birth was painful unlike any she'd had before.
- Jessica Jones: This happens in The Pulse, but not to an extreme degree. Jessica's enhanced genetics mean that she ends up delivering a healthy, full-term baby at only six months.
- Sandcastle: Zoe, one of the rapidly aging children, ages into a teenager, winds up pregnant after having sex with Louis, and swiftly delivers a baby girl.
- Tigra: In the aftermath of Civil War (2006), Tigra discovered she was pregnant by the Skrull impersonating Hank Pym. She disappears shortly after Norman Osborn takes power without so much as a baby bump, reappearing in time to take part in the Siege of Asgard. Afterwards, she reveals that she'd already given birth to a son, William, in the time between her escape from Osborn and her joining the battle there. Handwaved with a throwaway line about her race of cat people having two month gestational periods.
- X-Factor (2006): When Rahne reappears at X-Factor's HQ, she looks about seven months pregnant, leading poor Rictor to believe it's actually his child while she's actually only been pregnant for several weeks. This is explained in a throwaway line by her child being a hybrid of semi-god magical wolf and a werewolf-esque mutant human and with wolves having an average gestation period of two months.
Fan Works
- Downplayed in the Touken Ranbu fanfiction The Fox and the Moon. The reason given for Mikazuki and Kogitsunemaru's child being born at full term several weeks early is that they are part fox, which have shorter gestation periods than humans.
- Dib's pregnancy in this Invader Zim fanfiction which depending on the ending you choose to believe, may or may not be an actual pregnancy borders on Longest Pregnancy Ever. In-universe, the pregnancy lasts only a week, yet due to, Webcomic Time, the pregnancy would have appeared much longer if you were reading it while it was being updated.
- The show's usage of this helped inspire My Fluttering Heart. Cadance and Shining announced their pregnancy in "The One Where Pinkie Knows" and gave birth only 7 episodes later in the season 6 premiere. The fanfic justifies this by having the pregnancy be a lie. Flurry Heart is Shining's illegitimate daughter with Chrysalis and was conceived when Chrysalis did a Bed Trick on him eleven months prior. Shining and his wife pass her off as their own by claiming to be pregnant, waiting a month or two, and then showing off Flurry. Since no one has ever seen an alicorn foal (with alicornism being something you gain, rather than something you're born with), they decide that they can pass off Flurry's size and the short pregnancy as just being a weird alicorn thing.
- The egg in the infamous JoJo's Bizarre Adventure doujin CLAMP in Wonderland hatches into Jotaro and Kakyoin's child the morning after it... appears... in the middle of the night.
- This happens in this fic, with Ryuko, to her horror (and everyone else's mix of that and fascination), where, after one night of intimacy with Uzu, she finds herself pregnant full-term and gives birth about a day or two afterwards. As Hoka explains, a quick pregnancy and birth is a trait of her being a Half-Human Hybrid.
- In the Futurama fanfic The Mute and the Norm, Leela is a little under one month pregnant when she volunteers to test out Farnsworth's "Time Tomb," a Chronoton-powered Healing Vat designed to work by aging the injured body part to accelerate the healing process. This being a Farnsworth invention, it causes this trope instead. This ends up being a plot point, as Leela and the father never get an ultrasound and find out that their baby inherited Leela's cyclopia in the most dramatic fashion, when they see her for the first time.
- In Eye of the Fire Dragon, the protagonists find out that Lucy is pregnant with Natsu's child during the Oracion Seis arc. However, two months later, Lucy is kidnapped by a group of dark magic that want her child, since it would inherit both her Celestial Magic and Natsu's fire dragon magic. And to make the child easier to acquire, they use a spell to accelerate her pregnancy. Her teammates are able to rescue her, but the child had already gone through 6 months of development, with Lucy finally giving birth during the Edolas arc.
- Boldores And Boomsticks has a Ralts hatch from her egg a week early, because she could tell that Weiss needed a hug.
- Downplayed in Dragon Ball Z Abridged. Chi-chi's second pregnancy lasted only seven months (Goten was conceived in mid/late May and born on Christmas Day). She was also able to get a positive reading on a pregnancy test after only a few days. This can probably be chalked up to a combination of Goten being half Saiyan and Rule of Funny.
- J-WITCH Series: As shown in Nerissa's Start of Darkness chapter, her Mystical Pregnancy carrying Drago only lasts a few hours from conception to birth.
Films — Live-Action
- Abraxas, Guardian of the Universe has the evil alien Secundus impregnating a woman, who not only gives birth in a matter of seconds, but doesn't even get her pants off.
- Either an extreme version of this trope happened in Addams Family Values, or Morticia decided not to tell Gomez until the last second and didn't show at all.
Morticia: Marvelous news: I'm going to have a baby...right now.
- In Cradle of Fear, Melissa's demon baby is born one day after her sexual encounter with The Man.
- Horrific: At the end of Terror Vision, Rita and Jane both feel the first stirring of their alien pregnancies, despite the Face Full of Alien Wing-Wong having occurred no more than a few hours earlier.
- In The Ice Pirates, Karina is revealed to be pregnant just as the spaceship enters the time-warping zone. She gives birth to and raises her son in just a few minutes of screen time.
- In Into the Woods, the Baker's Wife instantly becomes eight or nine months pregnant the moment the curse is broken.
The Baker: That was quick!
- In the Robin Williams film Jack, the title character is born rather improbably, and quite unexpectedly, at 10 weeks' gestation; this reflects his 'four times normal speed' growth rate.
- The Lords of Salem: Due to the whole Mind Screw Gainax Ending nature of the whole film it's unclear if what is seen actually took place. During the gathering and visions in the theatre at the end, Heidi becomes pregnant, comes to full term, and gives birth to the Anti Christ in, from our perspective, a few minutes.
- In Prometheus, Dr. Shaw, abiding the Law of Inverse Fertility, becomes obviously pregnant within hours of conception, and has an emergency C-section before it comes to term. In that case, her partner was under the influence of Applied Phlebotinum, and the result was a giant proto-facehugger.
- Revenge of the Sith: Padme Amidala seems to go from barely showing to looking like she's about eight months along in the space of about a week. This was explained away by Star Wars: The Clone Wars: Padme actually realized she was pregnant much earlier but didn't have the opportunity to tell anybody (she and Anakin are in a Secret Relationship and spent almost their entire marriage separated by the war), and was able to conceal her baby bump with her clothing.
- It is natural for alien hybrids in Species to mature inhumanly fast. In Species II, they do it so quickly, they quite literally go out with a bang.
- The new Warlock in Warlock: The Armageddon is born when a Satanist preaches to the Devil. To her horror she becomes massively pregnant within minutes and gives birth to a black, slimy thing which quickly morphs into Satan's new minion and kills his "mother".
- In Xtro, a woman living in a cottage is attacked by an alien, who then pumps something into her mouth. Some time later, after she wakes up and staggers into kitchen, she suddenly feels pain in her stomach. It then begins to grow, and due to its weight, she falls down to the floor, revealing her enormous belly with something moving inside. Then, her water breaks, and she gives birth to a human-looking alien, dying in the process.
Literature
- Inverted in Amaranthine Saga where the immortal Amaranthine are noted to gestate at different rates than humans. A human woman impregnated by an Amarathine is pregnant for over three years before finally giving birth.
- Dream Park: In The California Voodoo Game, a loa-spirit in the tournament adventure impregnates Mary-Martha, and its offspring grows to full term over the course of a few dozen hours. Subverted in that the semi-divine fetus changes its mind at the last minute and decides to stay put, also inverting this trope into the Longest Pregnancy Ever (possibly permanent).
- From Dune Messiah, Chani's twins come to term superfast as a side effect of the Spice. She dies afterwards.
- Done artificially to heroine Morn Hyland in Forbidden Knowledge from The Gap Sequence. The pirate who was holding her prisoner was irritated that her pregnancy was making it hard for him to rape her.
- Diana's pregnancy in Gone develops at an accelerated pace, probably because the baby in question is a mutant.
- BJ gives birth to her daughter Laurel in Nick O'Donohoe's The Healing of Crossroads after a three-month gestation. This is because Laurel's father is a faun; they mature quickly.
- The Kharkanas Trilogy: The second book, Fall of Light, has Sandalath be raped by Lord Draconus' power repository that has become corrupted by too much evil in its vicinity and taken on a humanoid form. Due to the assailant's supernatural state, Sandalath goes through several pregnancies in a row which each take mere moments from conception to delivery until something capable of life is produced. Contrary to expectation, the result is not a Fetus Terrible, but a somewhat weird looking but otherwise sweet child with a case of accelerated aging.
- The Last Dragon Chronicles: It does not take long for the quickened bronze egg to turn into a baby. Too bad Gwilanna turned him from a perfectly normal (well, for a Pennykettle) boy into a dragon.)
- In Anne Rice's Taltos, the Taltos grow faster if the woman in question is aware of her pregnancy and sings to them while being pregnant; this happens within a few minutes at one point. They also age superfast once actually born, becoming adults and able to have their own children within minutes. This leads to a very squicky scene in which a newborn Taltos is forced to impregnate its own mother before it is promptly burnt alive.
- Bella's pregnancy in The Twilight Saga is visible after two weeks and comes to term in a month, due to the baby's father (Edward) being a vampire
- In the Women of the Otherworld universe, Elena's pregnancy only lasts five months, due to her being a werewolf. Somewhat unusual in that neither Elena nor her mate suspect anything unusual about her being as large as a fullterm pregnancy at only five months—Elena complains frequently about the inconvenience. Their cluelessness is justified since she's the first known female werewolf and thus she's having the first werewolf pregnancy. The Express Delivery is explained as splitting the difference between the duration of a typical human pregnancy and a typical wolf pregnancy.
Live-Action TV
- Vicky Dubcek on 3rd Rock from the Sun sleeps with the Big Giant Head in one season finale and mentions that she might be pregnant the next day. She steps out of the room and comes back looking six months pregnant. Then she goes into labor a few minutes later. Oddly enough, the resulting baby is normal.
- On Adam Ruins Everything, Emily finds out she's pregnant, and while she's excited to have a baby, she's not excited to have to give up UFC-style fighting and alcohol for nine whole months. Adam uses his TV powers to put her and Murph right in the delivery room, complete with obstetrician. It's only an Imagine Spot; she's not actually pregnant.
- Amen: Thelma went from announcing her pregnancy to not only being ready to deliver, but being two weeks overdue within a few months.
- Angel:
- In both Being Human (UK) and Being Human (US), Nina and her American counterpart Nora experience accelerated pregnancies of about twice the human rate of fetal development due to the fetus being a werewolf/half werewolf respectively.
- In an episode of Charmed (1998), Phoebe has a nightmare that this happens, but it was All Just a Dream.
- Doctor Who: In "The Tsuranga Conundrum", Yoss comes from a species where pregnancies only last a week (the male ones, anyway). At one point, he shows Ryan and Yasmin a series of sonograms taken only hours or days apart.
- Aeryn Sun does this in the Farscape: Peacekeeper Wars miniseries. Handwaved by her saying that soldiers of her species are genetically designed to become pregnant and come to term in a matter of a week or so and give birth in minutes (not to mention the part where a pregnancy can be in stasis without growing for up to seven years—my, but that military is efficient). It being a crossbreed between herself and the human John Crichton, labor to birth takes an incredibly long time—about half an hour at most.
- The miniseries also features a heavily pregnant Commandant Grayza who, presumably, is undergoing the same accelerated gestation as Aeryn since Grayza had not been established as being pregnant when last seen during the fourth season. This is actually a case of Real Life Writes the Plot as Rebecca Riggs, who plays Grayza, got pregnant during the gap between the show being cancelled and the miniseries being greenlit.
- Fringe
- In "The Same Old Story", the Fringe team were called in to investigate the case of a woman who got pregnant, reached full term, and gave birth in around fifteen minutes. The offspring died of old age in a half hour. The father was part of a government experiment and would also age very rapidly and ultimately did without regular doses of pituitary hormone. The mother died during delivery as a result of the toll the rapid pregnancy took on her body.
- This case gets called back in Season 3, when Alt-Olivia's pregnancy is accelerated to delivery in a few days as part of Walternate's master plan. This actually saved Alt-Olivia's life as she's a carrier for a virus that kills both mother and child before delivery. The accelerated pregnancy meant the virus didn't have time to attack and she was able to give birth successfully.
- Taken to extremes in Garth Marenghis Darkplace, when a man is raped by the mutated eye-ball of a sex offender and then immediately gives birth.
- In the Haven episode "Ball and Chain", Beatrice Mitchell would involuntarily transform into a beautiful woman named Helena. Helena would seduce and sleep with a random man, then change back to Beatrice. Beatrice would then get pregnant and give birth in a day of two, while the father suffers Rapid Aging. Beatrice's grandmother did something similar, but suffered Death by Childbirth bearing Beatrice's mother.
- Lucille Ball really was pregnant during the latter part of the second season of I Love Lucy. Unfortunately, the show then went on summer hiatus but her pregnancy didn't, meaning that when Season 3 started production, there was now an unexplained three-month gap, & Lucy gave birth after only four months in-universe.
- Kamen Rider Build eventually reveals that Ryuga Banjou's mother was only pregnant for two months before giving birth; this is explained as a combination of Mrs. Banjou being exposed to the energies from Pandora's Box, and the alien lifeform Evolt possessing her body and unintentionally passing to Ryuga in utero.
- On My Hero (2000), an Altron pregnancy apparently lasts only six weeks.
- Invoked with magic twice in Once Upon a Time; when Emma becomes the Dark one, at one point she slips a magic substance into Zelena's food which causes her pregnancy to progress faster so that Emma can kidnap her after she's given birth. The season after that, Rumplestiltskin considers doing this to Belle using the same substance (which is revealed to cause Rapid Aging in anyone who isn't pregnant), but ultimately doesn't go through with it. However, the Evil Queen does...
- One Life to Live's Luna Moody announced her pregnancy on Christmas Eve 1994 and gave birth the following May (only five months later) even though she couldn't possibly have conceived any earlier than November 1994 (she and her husband were estranged most of that year and only reconciled then).
- In season one of Riget, Dr. Petersen's pregnancy develops at a frighteningly fast rate. In the finale of the first season, she gives birth, to something that has the head of a fully-grown man.
- Tess in Roswell after sleeping with fellow E.T. Max, which leads her to push the alien quatuor to leave the Earth, whose atmosphere is (supposedly?) suffocating the fetus.
- Combined with Mister Seahorse in the Round the Twist episode "The Big Burp". Pete becomes pregnant by holding hands with a dryad after peeing on her tree. After an accelerated pregnancy, he gives birth through his mouth while handcuffed to his worst enemy.
- The Sandman (2022): Lyta conceives, carries, and gives birth to her son in the space of a single day, due to the conception and most of the pregnancy happening in a dream where time passes faster than in the waking world.
- Soap: Corinne has only been married a month, but her doctor says she's five months pregnant. She swears she didn't have sex with anyone else during the four-month mystery period, but her husband doesn't believe her. She gives birth just a few weeks later; turns out the baby is a devil-child.
- Star Trek:
- Tribbles from the Star Trek: The Original Series episode "The Trouble with Tribbles". Like the aphids example in the RL folder, they're born pregnant and are something of a Explosive Breeder.
- Deanna Troi has an express-lane pregnancy courtesy of a passing energy being in the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "The Child".
- Bajoran pregnancies only last five months, even if the fetus happens to be a human that was transplanted because of an emergency. Such was the case in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine when the O'Briens' second child was transplanted into Kira after an accident.
- Ten Miles of Peach Blossoms: Le Xu is pregnant with Ye Hua for only a few days.
- The Thundermans reveals that superhero pregnancies are very quick in the episode "A Hero is Born", about a day. In one scene, a normal Barb discovers she is pregnant, goes to the kitchen and comes back out about a minute later looking nine months pregnant.
- Sort of invoked in the Torchwood episode "Something Borrowed", when Gwen is implanted with an alien's egg the night before her wedding and looks about eight months pregnant by morning. The egg is removed before it hatches, however.
- The Umbrella Academy (2019): The Bizarre Baby Boom that results in the births of the Hargreeves consisted of women around the world who got pregnant and gave birth on the same day.
- WandaVision has Wanda go from approximately 4 months of pregnancy to childbirth in just a single afternoon. Vision expresses concern about this multiple times but Wanda and their doctor brush it off as just first-time father jitters.
- In Xena: Warrior Princess, Gabrielle carried and gave birth to her Fetus Terrible in one day.
- In The Young Ones episode "Cash", Vyvyan (male) appeared to go from conception to term in less than 24 hours. The "baby" turned out to be just a lot, a lot, A LOT of trapped gas. It's just that kind of show.
Music
- In the Abigail album by King Diamond, Miriam becomes pregnant and gives birth to the Fetus Terrible Abigail in the same day.
- This happens repeatedly in the music video for Chromeo's "When The Night Falls" via Distracted by the Sexy. However, it becomes Fan Disservice/possible horror in a hurry, but turns out to be All Just a Dream.
- Paula Cole's iconic "I Don't Want To Wait" (best known as the theme song to Dawson's Creek) contains the lyrics "She had two babies; one was six months, one was three", suggesting that this trope was in play in order for them to have been born so close together.
Myths & Religion
- The Bible: In the Book of Exodus, the Hebrew midwives are told by their Egyptian superiors to kill the baby boys that the Hebrew women give birth to, but they refuse to do so because they were God-fearing people. The excuse that they give to their superiors for sparing the baby boys is this: "Hebrew women are not like Egyptian women. They are so healthy that they have their babies before a midwife arrives." (from Exodus 1:19)
Tabletop Games
- Dungeons & Dragons has the Corrupt Conjuration spell "Searing Seed", introduced in Dragon Magazine #300, later appearing in The Book of Vile Darkness. If the victim fails to resist it, they become instantly pregnant — even if they're male — with a Fetus Terrible that is a half-fiend clone of the victim. This monster goes from conception to violently tearing its way out of its host-mother's stomach in 1D3 rounds. That's 6 to 18 seconds for non-D&Ders. It then grows into a fully mature adult within a round of being born. It also has a particularly psychotic case of Clone Angst, causing it to be obsessed with killing its parent/original, if they survived the birth. And they might not; the victim takes an incredible amount of damage from the trauma, even more if male, seeing as a male body isn't physically designed for such a thing.
- In Pathfinder, the Drakaina is a Mythic tier Aberration whose thematic powerset revolves around spontaneously impregnating herself — or any victim she can get her tentacles on — with rapidly growing, horrific, randomly mutated spawn.
Theatre
- In the final number of jukebox 80's musical Rock of Ages Sherrie goes into labor and gives birth in the Bourbon Room bar in under 25 seconds during a guitar solo. Add in an unknown Delivery Guy out of the strippers and metal heads present onstage, and the angel of deceased character Dennis presiding over everything for an Away in a Manger feel.
Video Games
- In Baldur's Gate II: Throne of Bhaal, a romance with Aerie leads to a pregnancy that is rushed through within the storyline of the expansion, which is unlikely to take more than a few weeks of game time. Even slightly more absurd than by real-life terms, because she's an elf, and the pregnancy should take a whole year. There's no in-story reason for this, nor is it acknowledged. (Some have suspected Aerie of lying about not having been with any man before the Player Character, but that would make just as little sense simply for the reason that then she would have been very visibly pregnant already for a long time.) It is possible to play through the whole plot before the baby is born, hiding the timeline absurdity from view.
- Elizabeth in BioShock Infinite is supposedly the miracle child of Columbia's prophet Zachary Hale Comstock, and is said to have only spent seven days in Lady Comstock's womb. What actually happened was that the sterile Comstock arranged the capture of his own Alternate Self's daughter from another timeline.
- The hack of Dig Dug called Baby Maker involves a naked man having sex with naked women underground. The sexual experience makes the woman plump up really quickly. At the end, a baby explodes out of the stomach. Dude sure is fertile.
- In Dragon Age: Origins, a male noble dwarf player can have sex with a noble hunter and her friend before he gets drafted into the Grey Wardens. When he is exiled and returns to Orzammar later on, one of the women will have already given birth to his son. While officially speaking the game takes place over the course of a year, if a player leaves Ostagar and makes a bee-line straight for Orzammar, at most a few weeks will have passed.
- Dragon Quest V sees your hero's wife going through this: depending on how quickly you play through the plot, she can go from marrying you, to confirmed pregnant with your children, to having said children, in a matter of hours... or only a few in-game days.
- In Fire Emblem Fates, female characters get married, pregnant, give birth, and have their children grow to young adulthood in the amount of time it takes to end an S-Rank conversation and exit your castle. The children growing up rapidly is justified by growing up in pocket dimensions where time moves faster, but the rest goes unexplained and unmentioned by the story.
- During the opening of the 90's Amiga game Heimdall, Thor needs to father a half-divine hero to recover the weapons of the gods and beds a fair maiden. When she wakes up the morning after, she's nine months pregnant, to her complete bafflement. Clearly, the gods were in a bit of a rush to get their stuff back.
- In Pokémon
- Kangaskhan are born pregnant. Or at least in-game they are as when breeding Kangaskhan, the eggs contain the mother and a child.
- The way Pokémon works is an example as all you need to do is put a male and female of compatible Egg Group together in the Daycare/Nursery and walk for a bit. Depending on whether the Pokémon are the same species or have different trainer I.Ds, eggs can be produced extremely quickly and in large numbers. Eggs hatch depending on the amount of steps you take, but this "waiting period" can be decreased as well. This can lead to a net increase of well over 100 offspring or more in a single breeding session.
- Rune Factory 2 and Rune Factory 3 have 15-day pregnancies. Rune Factory and Rune Factory Frontier make you wait a reasonable amount of time.
- A pregnancy in The Sims takes 3 Sim Days (3 hours of normal gameplay.) There exists a cheat that allows you to reduce the pregnancy to less than 1 Sim Day.
- Most Story of Seasons games (formerly known as Harvest Moon) have you wait about 60 in-game days from the announcement of the pregnancy until the birth of the child—which is semi-realistic as the Alternative Calendar has a season last 30 days, so it's about half the year after discovery.
- Not Harvest Moon: Animal Parade. Exactly seventeen days after your spouse says "If we're going to have kids, we've got our work cut out for us", the child is born. And the second one after the first only takes fourteen days. Even in Harvest Moon time, note that's equivalent to a month and a half. But who wants to wait two months to see their kid, anyway?
- In Story of Seasons (2014), after marriage and once the house is large enough at two stories, the female half of the pair will feel ill and go to the clinic with her husband, and they'll be informed by Marian that there's a set amount of days until the baby (they didn't know about) will be born. The length of the pregnancy is determined by the expense of the wedding, with 30 days for a cheap wedding, 20 days for a modest wedding, and only 15 days after you're informed if the most expensive wedding is done. You can in theory be parents a mere two weeks after you get hitched.
- Story of Seasons: Trio of Towns makes you wait until you've seen a special event with your spouse at least 31 days after marriage and upgrade your house to be large enough, but the pregnancy lasts a mere 45 days. If you're married to Woofio or Stephanie, there's no spouse event, and if you're married to Inari, you'll just get the baby the next day after the spouse event.
Web Animation
- When Tucker in Red vs. Blue gets turned into a Mister Seahorse by an alien, he gives birth to "Junior" in a very short amount of time.
- Sonic for Hire: Mother Brain gives birth to Soniqua within hours after having sex with Sonic.
- Played for equal amounts of laughs and Squick in an episode of the CollegeHumor series "Furry Force." One of the titular furries is pregnant in her squirrel form and gives birth on command to something resembling a buff mutant Scrappy-Doo in order to rescue the team...to the villains' great displeasure. There's a good deal of groaning and straining, but the labor is over in seconds. Then again, that's still far too long for the villains.
Webcomics
- In Shortpacked!, Leslie and Robin use some Applied Phlebotinum provided by Joe to have a child together. At first Robin only goes along with the plan if Leslie is the one to carry it, but Joe points out that Robin has Super-Speed and by his calculations could gestate a child in only three weeks. She eventually agrees. Literally seconds after her water broke, she pushed her triplets out right in the middle of the store.
Robin: An' so I pooped you out right into my leggings in the middle of the store.
Tabby: MOM!
Abby: Ha, awesome.
Western Animation
- King of the Hill has a variation of this. Peggy flashes back to when she gave birth to Bobby. From her perspective, she's given an injection of extremely powerful painkillers right as she's about to start labor, and then a few seconds later, Bobby is placed in her arms.
Peggy: I did not fully wake up until the ride home from the hospital.
Real Life
- Marsupials. They have a placenta, just like eutherians (placental mammals), but it's formed differently, so that its connection is weaker. Birth therefore happens in about 2-4 weeks, and the baby is still very small and embryonic. It makes its way up to the mother's pouch and continues its development there.
- Aphids (the little white insects you sometimes see eating your rose bushes) are literally born pregnant...which seems to be quite a time-saver!
