pregnancy: أبريل 2020

الأربعاء، 29 أبريل 2020

PM's baby can help ease coronavirus pregnancy fears, says top doctor

Obstetrician cites health of Carrie Symonds and son as reassurance for mothers-to-be

The healthy birth of Boris Johnson and Carrie Symonds’s son can help provide reassurance for anxious pregnant women, a leading obstetrician has said.

Giving birth can be a cause of anxiety even without a worldwide pandemic. There has also been data – albeit inconclusive – from China suggesting Covid-19 could be increasing the rate of premature births.

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How do I know the world has turned upside down? My football ground is now a maternity clinic | Adrian Chiles

West Brom has been given over to postnatal care – and it turns out it’s a perfect fit. This season, for the first time, it’s babies rather than fans who are doing the crying

I left home this week to make a short film for The One Show on BBC One. As a journalist with a public service broadcaster, I’m within my lockdown rights to do so, by the way. But feel free to scoff long and loudly at the notion that I’m any kind of essential worker.

The film I left lockdown to make this week was all about keyworkers – midwives and nurses with Sandwell and West Birmingham Hospitals NHS trust. Early on in the Covid-19 outbreak, the trust was concerned that new and expectant mothers were increasingly reluctant to come to clinics and hospitals for checkups. The call went out for help. West Bromwich Albion and Aston Villa football clubs put their hands up, and so it is that the executive boxes at the Hawthorns and Villa Park are ringing incongruously with the sound of babies crying. I’ve been watching West Brom at this ground every other weekend since April 1974, and I’ve heard all manner of wailing and gnashing of teeth there in that time, but never babies crying.

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الثلاثاء، 28 أبريل 2020

Harvey Goldstein obituary

Statistician who highlighted the dangers of smoking during pregnancy and did research into the effectiveness of schools

Using research to improve peoples’ lives is rarely straightforward. The finding in 1950 by Richard Doll and Austin Bradford Hill that cigarettes caused cancer caused a great stir, though not great enough to persuade people to smoke less. However, in 1972 the statistician Harvey Goldstein, who has died aged 80 of Covid-19, ultimately changed the behaviour of many mothers by demonstrating that smoking during pregnancy produced vulnerable babies. A social habit with relatively little impact on the foetuses of advantaged mothers could prove a serious risk for those born in poverty.

This was one of many significant findings from eight years’ work at the Institute of Child Health, London. There Harvey collaborated with Neville Butler, the initiator of a cohort study of all children born in Britain in one week in March 1958, which has continued. Harvey was responsible for planning its next stage during his time at the National Children’s Bureau (1972-77).

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السبت، 25 أبريل 2020

Australia's silent tragedy: a stubbornly high stillbirth rate and the push to change it

There is a perception stillbirth ‘just happens’ but experts say 20% of the 2,170 babies born still a year could be saved

Anne-Marie Imrie’s first pregnancy was cruising along well. She’d fallen pregnant quickly and she was healthy. As the months progressed, she started preparing – bought a pram and other baby items. And then, six and a half months in, baby Xavier’s movements started to change. She didn’t want to be a burden, so she didn’t call her doctor when she became worried in the night. When she did see her GP, she was sent to hospital, and they did a scan. That’s when she discovered Xavier had died.

“I was expecting … well, not that,” she says.

We can prevent this dreadful tragedy

It has been so hidden, so taboo, that when it does happen to people, they’re extremely shocked

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Which novels or memoirs will help prepare me for motherhood?

Francesca Segal recommends literary explorations of new emotional territory

Q: Can you recommend any particularly good novels or memoirs about the experience of motherhood? I have a few months to prepare and this feels as important as collecting tiny babygrows.
Sophie Lim, 42, London

A: Francesca Segal, author of Mother Ship (Vintage, £8.99), writes:

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The suspension of fertility treatment is an all too real tragedy for many couples | Barbara Ellen

It’s time we dispelled the myths about IVF being a lifestyle choice for career women

Don’t we owe it to those desperate for IVF treatment not to fall for the persistent spoilt/demanding female infertility narrative? Along with myriad NHS procedures, fertility treatment has been deemed “non-essential” during the pandemic. The Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority announced that it was suspended until further notice – affecting not just new patients but those in the middle of treatment.

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Poorer expectant mums lose over £4,000 through ‘unfair’ anomaly in benefits

System treats maternity allowance as unpaid income, skewing the amount of universal credit paid out

Pregnant women on the lowest incomes are being denied vital financial support during the Covid-19 crisis, according to unions and women’s support groups, who are calling for urgent reforms to universal credit.

An anomaly in the way universal credit differentiates between pregnant earners has created an unfair system, it is argued. Universal credit treats maternity allowance, which is paid to the lowest-earning women and those who are self-employed, as “unearned income”, which means it is deducted from their benefit payments.

It would take little effort to resolve the unfair treatment of maternity allowance in universal credit calculations.

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الجمعة، 24 أبريل 2020

New mother dies of coronavirus six days after giving birth

Fozia Hanif developed symptoms before her 29th birthday, resulting in premature birth of her son, Ayaan

A woman has died from coronavirus just days after giving birth without ever being able to hold her newborn son.

Fozia Hanif, started to develop symptoms and tested positive for the disease just before her 29th birthday, resulting in the premature birth of her son, Ayaan, earlier this month.

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الأربعاء، 22 أبريل 2020

The Easy Bit review – how men get to grips with IVF

This well-intentioned documentary about the first step in fertility treatment has moments of humour but is too emotionally hectoring

Tom Webb’s documentary about men’s experiences of fertility treatment is a well-intentioned film on a valid subject – but I found it flawed, over-reliant on six talking heads, almost to the exclusion of any other explanatory style. Webb speaks to six men whose partners are undergoing in vitro fertilisation (IVF), a notoriously painful, upsetting, intimately invasive procedure.

Men often don’t know how to express their feelings, or indeed if they are allowed to have feelings. They do what appears to be “the easy bit” in fertility treatment – supplying the sperm and then waiting while the woman goes through the incomparably more challenging business of IVF and then (they hope) pregnancy and childbirth.

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الثلاثاء، 21 أبريل 2020

'A lifeline': the doulas guiding clients through childbirth – from a distance

As coronavirus changes the way women experience pregnancy, doulas are caught between helping clients and the limitations caused by the pandemic

Last month, Robin Douthit comforted an anxious client by breathing with her, demonstrating one long inhalation and an equally steady exhalation. The two women then did it together, breathing slowly and intentionally in sync.

Breathwork is one of the tools that Douthit, 56, often reaches for when soothing clients. But this time, instead of sitting in the same room inhaling the same air, the women breathed together on Zoom.

You built this relationship, you fall in love with these people, you get excited about working with them, and then suddenly, you can’t

Doulas have been quietly filling in the gaps of the maternity care system for years and years

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Baby deaths scandal 'could be one of largest in history of NHS'

A further 270 cases are being investigated by a review into Shrewsbury and Telford trust

Hundreds more cases of baby deaths, still births and brain damage raising “very serious” concerns have been uncovered in a scandal that now threatens to be one of the worst in the history of the NHS.

A review into the tragic incidents on maternity wards at the troubled Shrewsbury and Telford NHS trust has identified 1,170 cases that warrant investigation.

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الخميس، 16 أبريل 2020

Hospital says baby of nurse who died from Covid-19 'doing well'

Public raise £100,000 to help daughter of Luton nurse Mary Agyeiwaa Agyapong, who had emergency caesarean

A baby delivered by an emergency caesarean operation in the UK to a nurse who died from Covid-19 is doing well, according to the hospital where the little girl was born.

The child has been named after her mother, Mary Agyeiwaa Agyapong, who continued to be the focus of tributes by friends and the general public, who have now donated more than £100,000 to her family.

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الأربعاء، 15 أبريل 2020

Pregnant healthcare workers pressured into Covid-19 frontline

Despite be classed as part of vulnerable group, in many cases women have capitulated, taken unpaid leave or sick pay

Pregnant healthcare workers are being pushed into working at the frontline of the coronavirus crisis, despite being classed as a vulnerable group by the government, the Guardian has learned.

Organisations supporting pregnant women are fielding calls for help from healthcare workers who are being told they must work – sometimes without personal protective equipment – even though they fear for their unborn children.

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Tell us about the babies born during coronavirus lockdown

We would like to hear about the children who have been born during the pandemic

In light of the coronavirus pandemic we want to hear about the babies who have been born during lockdown. If you have given birth, what has your experience been like? Did you give birth in hospital or at home? If you are due to give birth, how do you feel about the current situation?

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الاثنين، 13 أبريل 2020

Catherine Hamlin obituary

Doctor who pioneered the treatment of obstetric fistula in Ethiopia

When the obstetrician Catherine Hamlin, who has died aged 96, first arrived in Addis Ababa, the capital of Ethiopia, in the late 1950s, she knew she wanted to make a difference.

She just did not expect it to be through decades of successful treatment of a type of birth injury she had assumed was an academic rarity, first at a general government hospital, then at a small hospital built by herself and her husband, Reg, and eventually through a national network of six hospitals, 80 midwifery clinics, the Hamlin College of Midwives, and a rehabilitation centre.

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السبت، 11 أبريل 2020

Thousands lose last hope of having a baby as lockdown closes IVF clinics

Women tell of ‘bereavement’ because they will be too old for fertility treatment when the coronavirus shutdown ends

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Thousands of couples may have missed their last chance of conceiving via IVF as fertility clinics shut their doors to patients on Wednesday. Some women who are only just young enough to be eligible for treatment will be too old in a few months’ time.

The Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA), which regulates Britain’s fertility industry, has ordered private and NHS clinics to stop treating patients who are in the middle of an IVF cycle by 15 April. All new treatments have already been banned, a decision which is likely to prevent the births of at least 20,000 desperately wanted babies if it remains in place for 12 months.

I broke down. I’m aware that every day, at my age, my eggs diminish

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الأربعاء، 1 أبريل 2020

Covid-19: how does it affect pregnancy? – podcast

Sarah Boseley speaks to Prof Sonja Rasmussen about how the virus might affect mothers who are expecting and their unborn child

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