Motherhood reduces effect of education on young UK women's career prospects

Those with a dependent child are six times more likely to be economically inactive than those without children, study finds

Young women with higher education qualifications are just as likely to be out of work as young men who have no qualifications, often due to the impact of having children, poor mental health or a lack of suitable jobs, a major new study has reported.

Motherhood has a greater impact on a woman’s career prospects than her level of education, the study by the Young Women’s Trust found. “Qualifications do not outweigh the effect of being a woman,” the report said, though the higher the level of qualification that a young person has, the less their chance of becoming economically inactive.

Related: Gender pay gap widening for women in their 20s, data shows

Continue reading...

from Pregnancy | The Guardian http://ift.tt/2AFEqf0

Miscarriage research: the bioengineers taking a fresh look at pregnancy

With the help of CGI models of placentas, universities are collaborating to investigate why one in five pregnancies end in miscarriage

For an engineer, Dr Michelle Oyen has spent a lot of time with placentas recently. “It’s a really weird organ, half baby, half mother. It must begin functioning at the same time as it develops. There’s nothing else like it in the body,” she says.

Oyen is committed to discovering why pregnancies go wrong. And fascinated by applying engineering principles to medical research in her post as reader in bioengineering at the University of Cambridge. “You can’t experiment on pregnant women – it’s totally unethical and impossible.” Instead, her team take high-resolution images of donated placentas to understand the geometry of blood vessels. They then use these to build 3D online models to understand how blood flows around the placenta. “We are trying to understand how cells involved in building a placenta know how to invade the right amount into a uterus,” she says. “They have to get it just right, and it’s a poorly understood process.”

Related: Scientists identify cause of multiple miscarriages for first time

Continue reading...

from Pregnancy | The Guardian http://ift.tt/2Ar1sCk

‘Reality shrivels. This is your life now’: 88 days trapped in bed to save a pregnancy – podcast

Months before she was due to give birth, disaster struck for Katherine Heiny. Doctors ordered her to lie on her side in bed and not move – and gave her a 1% chance of carrying her baby to term

• Read the text version here

Subscribe via Audioboom, Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud, Mixcloud, Acast & Sticher and join the discussion on Facebook and Twitter

Continue reading...

from Pregnancy | The Guardian http://ift.tt/2yNC1OH

Doctors develop 'transformational' new DNA test for Down's syndrome

New test more accurate than current screening in detecting Down’s, Edwards and Patau syndromes and could simplify screening process, say researchers

Doctors have developed a more accurate test for Down’s syndrome and two rarer genetic disorders that are so serious the children often die soon after birth.

UK hospitals that adopted the test as part of a medical project found that it picked up nearly all affected pregnancies and slashed the number of women who wrongly tested positive, sparing them the anxiety of needless follow-up tests.

Related: NHS to offer safer Down's syndrome test to pregnant women

Related: Fears over new Down's syndrome test may have been exaggerated, warns expert

Continue reading...

from Pregnancy | The Guardian http://ift.tt/2hVUiPr

Hope or hype? The chilling truth about freezing your eggs

Cryogenic egg-storage techniques have improved dramatically in recent years.But as one woman says, ‘If this is your Plan B, you’ll need a Plan C’

Egg freezing, the process by which eggs are removed and cryogenically stored to prevent age-related decline, has seen a rise in popularity, with a threefold increase since 2014, according to research from the London Women’s Clinic. Meanwhile, recent coverage of “social” egg-freezing advocates, such as Dr Emily Grossman, seems to offer hope to women who want to buy time before meeting the right partner or to delay pregnancy. Ostensibly, egg freezing offers women this breathing space: to preserve their chance of having a baby without compromising on other aspects of their lives.

Except the most recent figures tell a different story. A study by the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA) of women who froze their eggs in 2014 found that only 14% of implantation cycles were successful. So how effective is the technology? And should women really be trusting egg freezing as a fertility solution, given the limited evidence in its favour? Dr Kylie Baldwin, a medical sociologist with the Centre for Reproduction Research at De Montfort University, is sceptical: “The technology has been presented as a magic bullet to level the playing field between women and men, reproductively speaking. However, the success rates are still low.”

Related: ‘The desire to have a child never goes away’: how the involuntarily childless are forming a new movement

Related: The real reason women freeze their eggs | Eva Wiseman

Continue reading...

from Pregnancy | The Guardian http://ift.tt/2Ac1Y6Y

Streptococcus vaccine 'could prevent over 100,000 baby deaths worldwide'

Experts call for more work to be done to develop vaccine for infection commonly carried by pregnant women, which can cause stillbirth and death

More than 100,000 stillbirths and baby deaths worldwide could be prevented by the development of a vaccine against an infection commonly carried by pregnant women, according to a groundbreaking report.

The impact of disease caused by group B streptococcus (GBS) has not been properly chronicled before and only in relatively recent years has anyone taken seriously its role in the deaths of babies in the womb as well as in the early days of life.

Related: The deadly bug that attacks babies at birth

Related: Babies being treated too late for neonatal infections, says Nice

Continue reading...

from Pregnancy | The Guardian http://ift.tt/2iyrQm9

A moment that changed me: losing our baby Joshua at birth | Anonymous

I saw tubes coming out of his body, he was wearing a pink hat. He was the most beautiful baby I had ever seen

My husband left for work at 3am that day because he was working remotely with colleagues in Australia. Heavily pregnant, I awoke as my husband left and read for a couple of hours before falling back to sleep. I woke again at 8am to find my waters had broken. “No. It can’t be,” I thought to myself. I was booked in for a caesarean section in two days’ time. I telephoned the labour ward and they told me to come into hospital. The incredible midwives, obstetricians, anaesthetists, foetal cardiologists and neonatologists were prepared for this eventuality.

Joshua had been diagnosed with a severe and complex pulmonary arteriovenous malformation (PAVM) seven weeks earlier at 31 weeks’ gestation. We later found out the PAVM had been caused by hereditary haemorrhagic telangiectasia, a rare and poorly understood genetic condition which affects blood vessels in the body. We had been told there was a chance Joshua could die of heart failure at any moment before, during or after birth.

Related: A moment that changed me: not standing up for my dying mother | Carina Stephens

After spending two hours with Joshua, we held him in our arms until he took his last breath

Related: 15 ways to support someone who is grieving

Continue reading...

from Pregnancy | The Guardian http://ift.tt/2irRZDj