pregnancy: يوليو 2018

الاثنين، 30 يوليو 2018

Baby love: how pop stars embraced pregnancy

Stars used to keep quiet about their pregnancies, fearing they could ruin their career. Now they are celebrating them – and Cardi B is leading the pack

‘SAD NEWS: I can’t see my vagina any more,” tweeted the record-breaking superstar rapper Cardi B in June. She had revealed her pregnancy to the public while performing on Saturday Night Live in April. Later, she tweeted that the last month of her pregnancy was “hell” and, when daughter Kulture was born, opened up about the baby’s sleeping patterns, her emotions (“I’m in love and I feel like I’m melting”), and, then, that she had “underestimated the whole mommy thing”, cancelling tour dates she had planned for six weeks postpartum. It was unusual to see a pop superstar documenting their experience of pregnancy and early motherhood so publicly. Until recently, pregnancy has been mostly anathema to the pop world.

However, a more positive, accepting attitude has been brewing for a while. In 2011, Beyoncé famously announced her pregnancy to the crowd at the MTV Video Music awards, and those watching at home, by flicking open her jacket, rubbing her bump and grinning. In 2017, a floral, veiled image of her kneeling while pregnant with twins received the highest number of Instagram likes of the year.

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'I got no help from the NHS': a new mother on facing mental illness

Libby Binks says she felt ‘useless’ at her lowest after developing postnatal depression and anxiety

Revealed: new mothers left to cope alone with mental ill-health

Libby Binks had postnatal depression and anxiety after the birth of her daughter Chloe in December 2014. However, despite telling a GP and a health visitor how she was feeling, Binks received no help from them.

Recalling the time after the birth, she said: “I felt more and more useless, inadequate and a burden on my husband, Adam, who seemed to be so much better at parenthood than me.

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Revealed: new mothers left to cope alone with mental ill-health

NHS care too limited to meet needs of pregnant women or those who have given birth

‘I got no help from the NHS’: a new mother on facing mental illness

Thousands of women are having to cope alone with mental health problems caused by pregnancy or giving birth because the NHS cannot provide the necessary help, a leaked report has revealed.

While up to one in five mothers have problems such as postnatal depression and post-traumatic stress disorder linked to childbirth, many are going untreated because specialist NHS care for them is so limited and the “gap” in help so wide, the research found.

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My IVF life: let's talk money. At $12,000 out of pocket, it's a bargain

Jean Hannah Edelstein explains why she was lucky to find coverage at work, but many IVF patients are not so fortunate

E and I pay a bit more than $12,000 out of pocket for IVF, and that is a bargain. Most of the $12,000 is for genetic testing, which is the whole reason that we are doing IVF, and which our insurance does not cover. They send us a form letter explaining why: because Lynch syndrome, the genetic issue that we are screening the embryos for, is statistically unlikely to cause cancer in children. Only adults. Hence, the insurance company wouldn’t have to pay for cancer treatment if we have a child born with Lynch, because the child would no longer be our dependent if they got a Lynch-related cancer.

It’s a cruel calculation.

To be a parent or to remain child-free is a choice that seems natural until the natural part is taken away from you

Why not just adopt? It’s a complex question, and flippant to suggest it as an easy solution.

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As a fat, pregnant woman, I refuse to panic about my baby’s health | Nanna Arnadottir

Ignore the scaremongering: the risks of being overweight are overplayed. Anxiety, on the other hand, does cause problems

Pregnant women who “allow” themselves to become overweight are “criminal”, and placing needless strain on the healthcare system. That is the verdict of the Finnish TV doctor Eva Orsmond.

“Women who allow themselves to be overweight when pregnant are criminal and are putting their lives and the life of their baby to be put in danger due to serious health complications when in labour,” said Orsmond, who now lives in Dublin.

People like Orsmond, GPs and media outlets don’t have to make complications sound so inevitable

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الأحد، 29 يوليو 2018

Tom Daley: ‘If I hadn’t met Lance, I don’t know if I’d be diving now’

From being objectified at 14 to coming out five years later, the diver has lived his life in public. Still only 24, he talks about his marriage to Lance Black, fatherhood – and why he’s speaking out about gay rights around he world

You could say this about any famous athlete, but Tom Daley more than most: you’re so used to seeing him in some outlandish endeavour – superhuman, ethereal, from such a young age, on such a vast stage, a Peter Pan without the wires – that it is incredibly confusing to see him sitting, like a regular person, in a regular London office (his publisher’s), in regular clothes, talking about mindfulness. He is about to publish Tom’s Daily Goals, subtitled “Never feel hungry or tired again”, which is a bit rum from this beacon of good living, yet of course, hard physical graft for many hours of most days means that he probably knows better than most what hunger and tiredness mean.

“I’ve toned this book towards imagining what my mum would be able to do, and what people would have time to do,” he says. Besides, he says, it’s not like the old days, when he could eat anything and do anything: most mornings, he wakes up and something hurts. He is still recovering from a shin injury, which itself is related to a hip problem, which itself is about a “lack of thoracic mobility. As I’ve gotten older as a diver, I have to really focus on doing everything I can to make my body younger.” He turned 24 in May, but, of course, elite athletes live time differently, do as much to themselves in a year as everyone else does in a decade; yet even leaving aside the brute physical endeavour, he has lived a lot of life; at 14, he was the youngest British competitor in the 2008 Olympics, dragging his sport with him on to the front pages. He still wears a ring of the Olympic rings that his parents got him, in lieu of what he really wanted. “They were, like: ‘We know you’re going to get a tattoo, but you know, we can’t let our 14-year-old get a tattoo. Imagine what your brothers would ask for.’” (He now has them tattooed on the inside of his upper right arm.)

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Maternity units 'could prevent 600 stillbirths a year in England'

NHS says national roll-out of ‘best practice’ could magnify 19 units’ success in saving 160 babies over two years

About 600 stillbirths a year in England could be prevented if maternity units followed national best practice, the health service said.

NHS England said practical steps including reducing smoking in pregnancy, and better monitoring of babies’ growth and movement in pregnancy and subsequently during labour, had already contributed to improved survival rates.

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الجمعة، 27 يوليو 2018

'Despairingly lacking': a midwife on support for breastfeeding mothers

The early stages are crucial, but busy midwives cannot always provide the help that is needed

Becoming a mother is visceral and humbling, and it’s rarely the experience you were expecting.

After the awesome feat of pregnancy and childbirth, in the thick of exhaustion and overwhelmed by the reality of a newborn, mothers then have to learn how to breastfeed. And it is something you have to learn, while simultaneously teaching your baby how to do it.

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الأربعاء، 25 يوليو 2018

Actor Brigitte Nielsen defends having baby at 54, saying: 'It's my life'

Older fathers don’t receive the sort of criticism I’ve had to endure, she tells magazine

The model and actor Brigitte Nielsen has said she understands why people think she is too old to have a baby at 54, but highlighted that older fathers never receive the same criticism.

Her daughter Frida – her fifth child, and her first with 39-year-old husband Mattia Dessi was born in June. Nielsen, now 55, has also revealed she started having IVF treatment 14 years ago in the hope of becoming pregnant.

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الثلاثاء، 24 يوليو 2018

Queensland trial giving Viagra to pregnant women halted after Netherlands deaths

Researchers pause to gather information after 11 babies died in similar Dutch trial

A Queensland study on reducing foetal distress during childbirth through the use of Viagra has been paused after the death of 11 babies in a clinical trial in the Netherlands using the same drug.

Mater Research Institute professor Sailesh Kumar said the study at the Mater Mother’s hospital used a much lower dosage of Sildenafil, which is sold as Viagra and dilates blood vessels in the pelvis, compared to the Dutch study.

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Eleven babies die after Dutch women given Viagra in drug trial

Research halted as 10 to 15 other participants wait to see if their children affected

Dutch women who were given Viagra to increase the growth of their unborn child as part of a major drug trial face an anxious wait after the deaths of 11 babies.

The research, carried out at 10 hospitals across the Netherlands, involved women whose placentas had been underperforming taking sildenafil, a medication sold under the brand name Viagra.

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الاثنين، 23 يوليو 2018

Women are turning to birth control smartphone apps for a reason | Dawn Foster

Contraception technology isn’t foolproof, but doctors must realise why we find the idea so appealing

Amid the targeted ads in my social media feeds, a war is playing out: two apps aggressively vie for my attention, stalking me from the sidebars of my browser and comprising every third photo in my Instagram feed – one offering to track my ovulation and get me pregnant, the other offering to do the same, but promising I won’t find myself in the family way.

The latter seems to be winning the war, with quirky gifs and videos showing young women waking up and gleefully taking their temperature, inputting digits into their colourful app, and being told they can throw barrier contraception to the wind that day. It’s sold as being hyper-scientific, with the founders and developers formerly working at Cern, and “without a single side-effect”: unless, of course you count unintended pregnancy as a side-effect.

Only when I repeatedly lost consciousness with pain was I granted a referral to a specialist

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السبت، 21 يوليو 2018

‘I felt colossally naive’: the backlash against the birth control app

Natural Cycles was hailed as a stress-free, hormone-free contraceptive. Then women began reporting unwanted pregnancies

Last summer I had an abortion. Statistically unremarkable, yes, but mine wasn’t because of a split condom or a missed pill. I was four months into a tense relationship with a much-hyped Swedish “digital contraceptive”, a smartphone app called Natural Cycles. I had spent my 20s on the pill, but hated not knowing whether my emotional state was down to artificial hormones or not. My boyfriend and I had been together for eight months, and I was desperately seeking something new, something that wouldn’t make me feel so anxious.

That’s when the adverts started following me around on social media: glowing women reclining in Scandi bedrooms, all pale grey sheets and dappled light, brandishing basal thermometers and telling me how great it felt to “get to know yourself better”. Natural Cycles’ ads promised the “world’s first contraceptive app”, something “natural, hormone free & non-invasive”. I could start using it without a two-week wait for a doctor’s appointment and so, in a fug of hormones and frustration, I bought a subscription. I was sold on shiny promises, a sleek user interface and the fact that a former Cern physicist, Elina Berglund, was at the company’s helm. But four months in, it failed. Berglund helped discover the Higgs boson; but it turns out her algorithm couldn’t map my menstrual cycle.

The ideal Cycler is in a stable relationship with a stable lifestyle. She rarely experiences fevers or hangovers

We were working at Cern, looking for the Higgs boson. We applied the same statistical methods to my wife’s ovulation

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الجمعة، 20 يوليو 2018

The 'trend' for donating vacation days to new moms is so depressing

American women aren’t guaranteed paid maternity leave – and while co-workers are stepping up, that’s nothing to celebrate

It’s a tough time for believers in American exceptionalism, but patriots should take heart; in one area at least, America remains stubbornly unique: as the only country in the industrialized world that doesn’t mandate employers to offer paid maternity leave.

America is also the land of innovation, however, and women with approaching due dates will be tickled to hear that a new workplace trend has sprung up to help them. In the absence of actual employment rights, generous co-workers are giving pregnant women in their office an unusual baby shower gift – not swaddling blankets or the latest Ergo baby-carrier, but a few days of their unspent vacation. And get this: the even more generous bosses are allowing it!

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الأحد، 15 يوليو 2018

Why we should learn to embrace failure | Elizabeth Day

Divorce, miscarriage, career knock-backs – the big moments in life often come through crisis and make us who we are, so don’t airbrush them out, says Elizabeth Day

A few months ago, I spent an evening sitting on the sofa in my flat, cropping my head out of a series of wedding photographs. It was a fairly surreal experience excising my smiling face from the pictures taken outside the chapel. It was not something I had ever anticipated, because you don’t think about divorce when you’re walking down the aisle. You don’t imagine it will happen to you. You don’t believe that one day, you will be digitally altering your wedding photographs so that you can sell your mermaid-style gown and long-sleeved lace bolero to a stranger on eBay.

And yet this is where I found myself. The dress had been hanging in my wardrobe for three years since the end of my marriage. It had been pressed up against the winter coats, shrouded in its dry-clean carrier, and although I tried to forget about it, I never could. The dress took up residence like an unwanted tenant, a constant reminder of my failure.

I am, I suppose, objectively successful. But it doesn’t always feel that way

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الجمعة، 13 يوليو 2018

My partner didn't want children. I did. Then I got pregnant...

We’re both writers and he didn’t want the distraction of kids. Could our relationship survive?

Last week, while driving along a country lane, I listened to the writer Michael Chabon, father of four, describe an encounter he had as a young, newly successful novelist: a famous older writer approached him with advice on how to succeed artistically, “Don’t have children. That’s the whole of the law.”

In one sense, what good advice! Keep your rucksack light, your muse close by. Guard every hour as your own. And yet… in another sense, the way the baby touches your face when you lift her from the crib is everything. Including material.

When our daughter was four months old, Brian flew west to meet her. During that visit, we knit together again

Our daughter kicked down the door and all my love for you came flooding through

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الخميس، 12 يوليو 2018

MPs urge Theresa May to apologise for ‘pain’ of forced adoption policy

Debate highlighted former practice of forcing unmarried UK mothers to give away babies

MPs have urged the prime minister to apologise on behalf of the nation to women who were forced to hand over babies for adoption in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s because of social disapproval of unmarried mothers.

An estimated half a million babies were adopted in the years preceding legal reforms in the mid-1970s. Many women have since come forward to say they were coerced into handing over their babies by “moral welfare officers”, the forerunners of social workers, and church-run mother-and-baby homes, the Commons heard.

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Kick pushchair-chasing companies like Emma’s Diary out of our hospitals | Rebecca Schiller

Using the NHS to gain commercial access to pregnant women and new mothers is totally unacceptable

Private companies that exploit pregnant women courtesy of NHS staff and services have long made me sick. Companies with commercial agendas dressed up as philanthropy – such as Emma’s Diary and Bounty – are promoted to pregnant women via their appointments with midwives or GPs and after childbirth in NHS hospitals.

They dangle free gift incentives in front of women, encouraging them to sign up to mailing lists and baby clubs that will share their data (thanks to carefully worded privacy statements) with a wide range of firms – from pharmaceuticals to cars. These firms will go on to bombard them with marketing materials at a time of financial and emotional strain. And now we know that some of the data collected by one company was used for political purposes.

If something feels this wrong to so many, that is often because it is wrong

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الأحد، 8 يوليو 2018

Seven ways IVF changed the world – from Louise Brown to stem-cell research

The first ‘test-tube’ baby turns 40 this month, but the impact of in vitro fertilisation extends far beyond solutions to fertility problems

It sounds rather perverse and archaic today to call a child born by IVF a “test-tube baby”. The technique of assisted reproduction has become so widespread and normalised, more than 6 million babies down the road, that there’s nothing so remarkable or stigmatising in having been conceived in a petri dish (“in vitro”means in glass, although test tubes were never involved). In many countries worldwide, 3-6% of all children are now conceived this way.

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السبت، 7 يوليو 2018

Motherhood: A Novel by Sheila Heti; An Excellent Choice by Emma Brockes – reviews

How does a woman decide whether to have a child or not? Two writers offer contrasting but equally important perspectives

Perhaps the single greatest leap forward for women in the last 50 years has been the way legislation and medical advances have meant – for those of us living in more enlightened parts of the affluent west, at least – that motherhood is no longer almost inevitable but one of many possible courses for a life. This freedom has come with a cost, as the conservative press likes to remind us daily: while women are putting off childbirth in favour of professional success, finding the right partner or merely scrabbling together enough resources to make sure parenthood is not punitive, we will eventually slam up against the immovable deadline of our biology, with all the agony, regret and soul-searching that entails, if we dare to “leave it too late”.

Guardian journalist Emma Brockes and Canadian novelist Sheila Heti both found themselves in their late 30s weighing up the pros and cons of motherhood. Both, it must be noted, approach the issue from a position of considerable privilege, which they recognise: both white, middle-class professionals with no serious fertility problems, they have the luxury of considering the more abstract ethical questions around whether or not to have a child, and the potential ramifications for their own lives and the people who love them. It’s also important to note that these are not books about parenthood. They are specifically about the question of becoming a mother; it is impossible to imagine a man writing the equivalent of either book, not simply because the biological imperative against a ticking clock is less stark, but because fatherhood is not seen – culturally, psychologically, emotionally – to consume and usurp a man’s identity in the same way.

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الجمعة، 6 يوليو 2018

Pregnant Cambodian women charged with surrogacy and human trafficking

Thirty-three women charged under law targeting surrogacy, which was outlawed in 2016

Thirty-three pregnant Cambodian women hired to act as surrogate mothers were formally charged with surrogacy and human trafficking offences.

The women, who were arrested last month when police raided the illegal business, were charged on Friday at the Phnom Penh municipal court under a law that specifically targets surrogacy, which was outlawed in 2016 as Cambodia was becoming a popular destination for would-be foreign parents seeking women to give birth to their children.

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الأربعاء، 4 يوليو 2018

From apps to artificial wombs: the smart tech transforming NHS care

Smart pills can keep track of a patient’s correct dose – and could even monitor vital signs

NHS at 70: all our anniversary coverage in one place

Look beyond the huge technological shifts that are revolutionising how the NHS operates, and there are a multitude of less heralded breakthroughs and gadgets that could ease the workload on staff, and help prevent illnesses.

Some are already being used in the health service, while others are in clinical trials, or are hopeful ideas waiting to break out of research labs.

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الثلاثاء، 3 يوليو 2018

Emil Gayed: disgraced gynaecologist allegedly fired from Mona Vale hospital in 2007

Ingrid van Baren-Davey says Gayed perforated her bowel during laparoscopy and she needed emergency surgery

A gynaecologist recently banned from practising medicine after he performed surgery on numerous women without their consent was allegedly fired from Mona Vale hospital on Sydney’s northern beaches more than a decade ago, the Guardian has been told.

The Health Care Complaints Commission (HCCC) confirmed to Guardian Australia that it received a complaint from a patient, Ingrid van Baren-Davey, in 2007. But a HCCC spokesman could not confirm what if any action was taken against Dr Emil Shawky Gayed at the time, saying the case was referred to the medical board for management.

I wanted to press charges, because to me it was assault and butchering.

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No lack of real beer due to CO2 shortage – just Eurofizz | Brief letters

Real ale | NHS at 70 | Vaginal treatments | Morris cars | Hiding valuables

Regarding the shortage of CO₂ reported in the Guardian over the last week, it does not lead to a shortage of real beer – only of the ersatz versions such as lager and the like. I have seen no shortage of proper beer here in West Somerset. Real ale, whether bottle or cask conditioned, needs no extra input of CO₂ as it creates its own. Perhaps now is a good time to extol the virtues of real ale as opposed to Eurofizz!
Alan Bond
Watchet, Somerset

• Re The NHS at 70: what has it got better at? (Journal, 2 July): diagnosis of bowel cancer in the over-60s. Do the postal test, send it off, and (fingers crossed) you’re clear for two years. But if you’re not, you’ll have an op within 18 weeks. Thanks to all who treated and supported me.
Margaret Waddy
Cambridge

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الاثنين، 2 يوليو 2018

Why the truth about breastfeeding and weight loss is far from the myth

Does breastfeeding help you lose weight? Serena Williams doesn’t think so – here’s what scientists say

Serena Williams has poured cold water – or rather, cold milk – on the idea that breastfeeding causes the excess weight gained while growing a baby to melt away.

Breastfeeding is widely touted as a means of weight loss, but even though it’s a hungry business as far as the body is concerned, there are several reasons why simply sitting back and letting baby suck away the calories often doesn’t cut it.

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