pregnancy: ديسمبر 2018

الجمعة، 28 ديسمبر 2018

Mothers are being abused during childbirth. We need our own #MeToo | Sally Gimson

Many women are scared to speak out about their treatment at the hands of medical professionals as they give birth

When I had my first baby by caesarean section, I woke up on the operating table. The pain was so extreme as they were cutting me open that as I was regaining consciousness my first thought was that I had gone to hell, and was being tortured. The pain was accompanied by a loud beating in my head. When I became more conscious, I realised that I had not been given enough anaesthetic, but I was paralysed and there were tubes in my mouth. Then I heard them say in German – because I was in eastern Berlin only a few years after the wall had come down – “She can have everything now.” Mercifully, I passed out. When I woke, I tried to say something in my faltering German. But they patted my hand, got my husband to show me my baby and pretended they hadn’t understood.

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from Pregnancy | The Guardian http://bit.ly/2CEJOPh

الأحد، 23 ديسمبر 2018

Women can reclaim power over our bodies – by talking about them | Mandy Len Catron

Acknowledging the biological reality of a woman’s body is still unladylike. But if we can’t talk about our reproductive lives, we can’t defend them

I must have been four or five the first time I was told to “sit like a lady” – that is, with knees together. After that, no one needed to spell it out for me. A lady, I understood, was in full command of her body at all times.

This body never inconvenienced anyone by drawing attention to itself, or taking up too much space, or, God forbid, having any discernible odor. Like a dress worn for two hours on Easter Sunday, a lady’s body was to be admired, not lived in.

Shame and silence are powerful tools of misinformation

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from Pregnancy | The Guardian http://bit.ly/2R76cJl

السبت، 22 ديسمبر 2018

The science stories that shook 2018

Our guest scientists pick the breakthroughs and discoveries that defined their year, from insights into human evolution to our first trip aboard an asteroid

Take a deep breath. Dive into the emerald water. It’s 13 minutes and 70 metres down to lunch. Are you dead yet? Not if you are one of the Bajau “sea nomads ” of south-east Asia, who have been free-diving like this for more than 1,000 years, relying on their remarkable physiology, and, as we learned in April, their genes. Humans left Africa 50 millennia ago, encountering new environments that required adaptation to survive. Adaptation is mostly cultural – building shelters, using fire, deciding what to eat, and transmitting instructions from generation to generation. But alongside this are advantageous genetic mutations grasped by natural selection.

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from Pregnancy | The Guardian http://bit.ly/2BFp2x5

الجمعة، 21 ديسمبر 2018

NHS to fund surgery on unborn babies with spina bifida

From April patients will be able to have prenatal procedure to repair foetus’s spine

Unborn children with spina bifida will be able to have surgery in the womb under NHS plans to give more patients innovative treatments.

Evidence from abroad has found that the procedure can improve the lives of sufferers, even allowing some infants to walk who might not otherwise have been able to do so.

Everolimus, a new drug that treats epileptic seizures caused by a genetic condition that leads to benign tumours forming in the body and the brain. About 300 people, most of them children, will start to get it.

Selexipag, a new tablet that treats pulmonary arterial hypertension, a life-threateningly dangerous form of high blood pressure. It works by relaxing and widening the blood vessels connected to the heart and lungs to stop them getting damaged, ultimately reducing the risk of heart failure.

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from Pregnancy | The Guardian http://bit.ly/2SfGkrY

الثلاثاء، 18 ديسمبر 2018

Why do stories about morning sickness inspire such rage? | Zoe Williams

Medicine has a history of minimising female pain, even more so when the female is pregnant – there’s a savagery directed at the whole maternal package

You can tell when the Daily Mail disapproves of something because it puts it in capital letters, so it feels as though you, the reader, are being shouted at, which is confusing. How can it be your fault? You only just found out.

Anyway, the Mail is very angry with pregnant women: 20,000 ambulances (or “up to”, so it could be any number) are despatched every year for morning sickness. What a shameful waste of NHS resources. Those women should just eat a ginger biscuit and stop moaning, like it says in baby manuals from the 50s.

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from Pregnancy | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2PMnpTA

الاثنين، 10 ديسمبر 2018

‘We meet hate with curiosity’: Dustin Lance Black on Tom Daley, babies and the ethics of surrogacy

The screenwriter and his husband had a son in June and bonded deeply with the surrogate mother. Now he has recorded a podcast series exploring the process in depth

Dustin Lance Black was a screenwriter, living in Los Angeles, in demand and extensively garlanded, when in 2013 he met Tom Daley, the Olympian diver from Plymouth. Black was the ultimate progressive all-rounder – then 39, he had won an Oscar for Milk, a biopic of the assassinated gay rights activist Harvey Milk, and built a reputation for his activism on gay marriage. He was also known for the thoughtful, open manner of his pioneering: his narration of the awardwinning documentary 8: The Mormon Proposition was informed by his experience of growing up gay in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

So, when he fell in love with the diver – who is 20 years his junior and was then studiously neutral on politics, in the way athletes often have to be – it was not obvious from the outside that they were made for each other. Yet in the world where celebrities are still people, it was obvious to them. I have interviewed Daley, too, and he told me he introduced Black to his entire family and his friends in the week of their first date. They moved in together in London in 2014, got married in 2017 and this year had their first child.

When we announced our pregnancy, in the US there was just a lot of congratulations. Here it was more mixed

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from Pregnancy | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2Uye19G

الجمعة، 7 ديسمبر 2018

When my patient died giving birth, the reality of US maternal mortality and race hit me

Pregnancy-related deaths among black women are triple those of our white counterparts

I don’t allow myself to remember much about my patient who died. I don’t remember her name. I don’t remember the date. I don’t even remember how old I was at the time. But as a result of this memory, I am forever changed.

In almost a decade of maternity nursing, I’d never had an adult patient die, and I haven’t had a patient die since. Over the past 13 years, I have delivered numerous babies who died in utero or were born alive, but were expected to die shortly after birth because of their low gestational age or conditions that were incompatible with life. I am familiar and comfortable with providing support to a family who were preparing to lose, or had just lost, a much-wanted baby. This day was different. I received a report from the nurse going off duty on a living, breathing, labouring young woman, only to leave the hospital with nothing to give to the next nurse coming on shift.

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from Pregnancy | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2L0ZNd2

الثلاثاء، 4 ديسمبر 2018

'We could have saved them': Australia's stillbirth rate unchanged for 20 years

Landmark report finds stillbirth affects 2,000 families a year, and the rate is twice as high for Indigenous mothers

A landmark report into stillbirth in Australia has found that, unlike comparable countries around the world, Australia’s stillbirth rate has not changed in more than 20 years, and the rate among Aboriginal mothers is twice as high.

There were emotional scenes in parliament on Tuesday night as Labor senator Malarndirri McCarthy tabled the report in a wooden coolamon, traditionally used in Indigenous families for carrying babies.

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from Pregnancy | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2Pnx9na

Shared leave policy is a confused mess | Letter

The system is in urgent need of reform, writes Peter Moss

The feature on “shared parental leave” (The couples who share parental leave – and its highs and lows, 1 December) failed to explain that this policy is not parental leave at all, but transferable maternity leave with use by fathers dependent on their partner’s agreement to transfer a part of her maternity leave. Genuine parental leave is an entitlement equally available to both parents. Though not mentioned in your article, it does exist in the UK due to an EU directive, with each parent entitled to 18 weeks’ non-transferable parental leave, albeit unpaid and only available for four weeks per year. The UK’s leave policy is confused, confusing and dysfunctional, and in urgent need of reform. This is unlikely to happen while misleading terminology goes unquestioned and alternatives that might lead to more equal sharing of childcare are unexamined.
Emeritus Professor Peter Moss
International Network on Leave Policies and Research

• Join the debate – email guardian.letters@theguardian.com

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from Pregnancy | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2RyVf01

The nasty shock of being offered a seat | Letters

Robin Burt and Margaret Fingerhut say they were mortified to be offered a seat, but Valerie Smith says that when offered one, one should accept

“Young people these days have no manners” is the sort of thing old blokes like me and John Crace say to each other (If you see me on the tube, please don’t offer me your seat, 1 December). But nobody in a social gathering would dream of suggesting we might be getting on a bit. So why is it that when we get on a crowded tube that young men offer us their seat? It’s worse than that. Young women do it as well.

What we need is a strategy. The grey hair doesn’t help, although I have enough to delude myself that I have achieved the suave, silver fox look. Maybe it’s the way we dress? I’m usually in “smart casual”, going home after an afternoon tea dance, buoyed up with confidence because an attractive young woman has asked me to dance with her or I am on my way to a jazz club. There’s not much scope on a crowded train to demonstrate that we can walk unaided so maybe it’s the way we stand. I have tried that Fred Astaire pose: one foot flat on the floor, the other crossed at the ankle, toe touching the floor (it’s harder than it looks, try surreptitiously holding the vertical pole). Then there’s how to respond: “No, I’m fine, thanks” or “It’s OK, I’m getting off at the next stop”. I’ve tried avoiding eye contact, then they get up and touch me on the shoulder. Suggestions on a postcard… no, not a postcard, that makes me sound old.
Robin Burt
London

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from Pregnancy | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2zJh6uE

Surrogacy isn’t about money. But the law must change to benefit women | Natalie Gamble

UK law limits payments and provides little structure for surrogacy. Only proper regulation will protect surrogates

One of the UK’s most senior family judges, James Munby, has called for the UK to relax the rules against paying surrogates. His comments are spot-on: the law needs to catch up with the realities of modern surrogacy.

For decades it has been customary in the UK for surrogates to be paid between £12,000 and £20,000. Having handled hundreds of UK surrogacy cases (not just complex and international surrogacy cases, but also routine, everyday UK cases), I have seen only a small minority where there has been no element of benefit or compensation. The family court now routinely authorises payments to surrogates of more than their expenses, both explicitly in the high court and implicitly in the magistrates’ court, where sums are accepted at face value. The case law makes clear that payments will always be authorised after the event where this is in the child’s best interests. There has never been a case where an order transferring parenthood has been refused.

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from Pregnancy | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2PgOcqJ

الاثنين، 3 ديسمبر 2018

The tragedy of stillbirth: 'An unfathomable amount of heartbreak'

Stillbirth statistics in Australia have barely changed in 20 years. Two scientists are driven to make progress, raise awareness and empower women

The Centre for Research Excellence in Stillbirth is in a grand heritage building within the vast Mater hospital complex in Brisbane. With verandahs on all sides, it’s fronted by palm trees and jacarandas in bloom. Aubigny was once a private house with a small synagogue – the Sisters of Mercy took it over and turned it into a hospital, one now so large it surely has its own postcode. A statue of the Virgin Mary at the entrance makes me think of the prayers and curses no doubt directed her way by suffering patients and their families for more than a century.

Stillbirth is one tragedy many people assume has been consigned to history. But the conversation I’m about to have in this lovely old building with the centre’s director, Professor Vicki Flenady, and her colleague, Dr Fran Boyle, demolishes that assumption. It is not a rare event.

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from Pregnancy | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2BNnJOa

الأحد، 2 ديسمبر 2018

Infertility is an issue for some women with endometriosis. But it’s not the whole story | Kate Young

Unintended pregnancy can be difficult for any woman - and it is just as common in women with endometriosis

Recent advances in public awareness and policy for endometriosis – a chronic inflammatory condition experienced by women – have been promising. But we still have a long way to go until women’s diverse needs are met through quality healthcare for endometriosis (among other conditions). As a public health researcher, one of my key concerns is what women are told about endometriosis and fertility.

With the way endometriosis is often spoken about one might think it is a sentence for infertility. This is not the case. Far from it.

So what are the consequences for women of telling them that a diagnosis of endometriosis is a sentence for infertility?

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from Pregnancy | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2zzTLeL