Pregnancy mythbusting: from ‘eating for two’ to pineapple bringing on labour

The idea that women need to eat a lot of extra food when they are pregnant has endured, but it’s not the only nonsense expectant parents have to put up with

The myth of “eating for two” endures partly because it kind of makes sense, but mainly because it is so appealing. In a survey of 2,100 women, the National Charity Partnership (NCP) found that two-thirds of women did not know how many extra calories they needed during pregnancy (a measly 200 a day – something like, the charity says, two pieces of wholegrain toast with olive-oil spread – and only in the third trimester). Being overweight in pregnancy carries increased risks to the woman and baby; the myth, said the Alex Davis, head of prevention for the NCP, is “very unhelpful”. Other myths are just annoying – and at no other life stage will a woman be subjected to so much rubbish.

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Bodies review – the high price of a rented womb

Royal Court, London
Vivienne Franzmann examines the economics and human cost of surrogacy in this thought-provoking drama

Vivienne Franzmann has made her name with dramas – Mogadishu, The Witness – about scruples, power and exploitation. Now she examines surrogacy. The economics and the human cost. In Bodies, Justine Mitchell plays, with febrile precision, a white English telly producer desperate to conceive. She is efficient but frantic. Even her description of making kale crisps is obsessional – though perhaps making kale crisps is a definition of an obsessive. Her husband is used to confiscating razor blades and refusing invitations where children are present: Jonathan McGuinness, standing in for a sick Brian Ferguson, showed how a script in the hand need not impede a passionate performance.

The surrogate mother in India has to leave her own children untended

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Boots’ morning-after apology isn’t easy to swallow | Barbara Ellen

Boots has said sorry in the row over its emergency pill, but its comments reveal how women are still judged on contraception and sex

Boots, Britain’s largest chemist, has now apologised (and maybe narrowly avoided a nationwide boycott) for “causing offence and misunderstanding” with its comments to the British Pregnancy Advisory Service (BPAS) about not wanting to lower its price for the morning-after pill (MAP), because it didn’t want to be accused of “incentivising inappropriate use”.

This led to a storm of criticism, including a Labour party letter, signed by Jess Phillips, Yvette Cooper, and Harriet Harman and 32 other female Labour MPs. Phillips later said: “Boots’ justification infantilises women and places a moral judgment on them.” Quite. It’s good that Boots apologised, but a “misunderstanding”?

Related: Wake up, Boots. You can’t judge women who need the morning-after pill | Sian Norris

Related: Boots apologises over morning-after pill pricing row

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Boots faces boycott over refusal to lower cost of morning-after pill

Tesco and Superdrug halve price of emergency contraceptive after charity campaign, but Boots retains higher price

There have been calls for a boycott of Boots after the chemist refused to lower the cost of the morning-after pill for fear it would encourage over-use.

Rivals Tesco and Superdrug halved the price of the emergency contraceptive following a campaign from the British Pregnancy Advisory Service (BPAS), a leading provider of abortion care.

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Government unveils plans to cut adult smoking rate in England to 12%

Long-awaited tobacco control plan also targets reduction in number of 15-year-olds and pregnant women who regularly smoke

The government has announced plans to cut smoking rates among adults in England from 15.5% to no more than 12% by 2022.

Its long-awaited tobacco control plan, which was due to be published last summer, also targets a reduction in the number of 15-year-olds who regularly smoke, from 8% to 3% or lower; and a fall in the proportion of pregnant women smoking, from 10.5% to no more than 6% over the same period.

Related: Doctors urge Theresa May to publish anti-smoking strategy

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Bodies review – Vivienne Franzmann explores the ethics of surrogacy

Royal Court, London
This family drama confronts a host of dilemmas but is at its best when it allows a fine cast to express the characters’ strained relationships

Vivienne Franzmann has in the past tackled the victimisation of teachers (Mogadishu) and the exploitative nature of photojournalism (The Witness). Now she confronts the ethical and social dilemmas raised by surrogate motherhood, and the result is a decent play that ticks all the right boxes without fully achieving the emotional intensity the subject demands.

White, middle-class Clem, a TV producer by trade, is desperate for a baby. So she and her husband, Josh, pay £22,000 to an agency and find themselves locked into a global transaction in which a Russian woman’s egg is fertilised by Josh and implanted in the womb of an Indian woman. But Clem is increasingly estranged from her old-fashioned socialist dad, who has motor neurone disease, and who says she should be ashamed of herself. Her residual guilt surfaces in Skype conversations with the Delhi doctor supervising the surrogacy, and is compounded when legal difficulties arise.

Related: Vivienne Franzmann's Pests: 'It is brutal. But it is authentic. I feel ethical, clean about it'

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Am I pregnant? You asked Google – here’s the answer | Nell Frizzell

Every day millions of internet users ask Google life’s most difficult questions, big and small. Our writers answer some of the commonest queries

• Nell Frizzell is a freelance journalist

Being pregnant, like being awake, seems fairly black and white until you try it yourself. You’re either pregnant, or you’re not. Unprotected sex, a bloodless gusset, tender breasts – you’re pregnant. Except you might not be. Or might not be for long. Or might never be again.

When you get here, being pregnant suddenly becomes a far more delicate, changeable, more abstract state than you’d imagined. You may be pregnant. But then again, you may have endometriosis, so the swelling, the late period and tender breasts aren’t the result of a baby at all. You might be peri-menopausal, so the fatigue, the skipped periods and disrupted sleep are a sign of no more eggs, not a fertilised one. You could be stressed, have disordered eating or a hormone imbalance, causing your periods to halt for a while without you knowing why.

Related: Nothing prepared me for pregnancy – apart from the never-ending hangover of my 20s

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Vaginal mesh risks downplayed by Johnson & Johnson, court told

Device was ‘aggressively’ marketed as a way to treat pelvic floor damage but left thousands of woman in debilitating and lifelong pain

A pharmaceutical giant allegedly played down the risks of a vaginal medical device that has caused debilitating and irreparable pain to thousands of women after giving birth.

Instead it was “aggressively marketing” to surgeons as a cheap and easy way to boost their profits.

Related: Vaginal mesh left me in agony. When will women’s health be taken seriously? | Kath Sansom

Related: NHS and medical devices regulator tried to limit scandal over vaginal mesh implants

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Cancer-surviving women a third less likely to become pregnant, study finds

Impact of cancer and treatment on female fertility has much improved in recent years, finds survey of 23,000 medical records

Women who survived cancer in the past 30 years were a third less likely to become pregnant than women in the general population, according to study into the impact of the disease and its treatment on patients.

The research provides the first broad assessment of how cancer, the fertility-harming therapies that patients receive, and the decisions women make on leaving hospital, can affect their plans for a family.

A 30-year-old who has chemotherapy will have the reproductive potential of a 40-year-old

Related: Cancer rates set to increase six times faster in women than men

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Pregnant in the field: have trowel, will travel

An archaeologist gave birth to a new photographic genre by asking fellow scientists to post snaps of themselves digging while expecting

Suzanne Pilaar Birch was seven when she caught the archaeology bug on a family trip to Jamestown, Virginia, the first permanent English settlement in the Americas. “Oh this is so cool!” she declared. “I want to come back here and dig.” So when, 24 years later – and now a professional archaeologist based at the University of Georgia and still devoted to digging – she was invited on a field trip in Cyprus, it should have been a no-brainer. Except that she would be six months pregnant on the trip.

It was her first baby, due in August, a child that she’d put off having for eight years because of her career, and she’d vowed not to fly far or do fieldwork that summer. Plus, in more than 10 years working in archaeology (she specialises in analysing animal bones to reconstruct ancient environment and diet), she’d never met a single pregnant woman on a field trip.

Pregnant women are always pictured so clean, dressed up nicely, in a yoga pose or something

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