pregnancy: مايو 2021

الأحد، 23 مايو 2021

Too late or too great to gestate? Don’t worry, Britain will welcome you | Catherine Bennett

In contrast to other countries, our surrogacy laws ignore the traumas faced by birth mothers

‘A beautiful little blessing has chosen me to be her mother.” Naomi Campbell’s announcement, posted on Instagram last week, is unusually worded even given the fashion for “welcomed” in media reports of significant births, as if there really were some depot from which ready-made infants are now Deliverood for introduction to their new owners.

Campbell’s phrasing added to a general, not unreasonable belief, one reportedly shared by “friends”, that the 51-year-old Campbell’s baby was born via a surrogacy arrangement. In the US, one of the world’s most liberal destinations for commercial surrogacy, with clients including leading US celebrities – that is, in buying rather than supplying the service – it would have been, if so, an unremarkable transaction. Kim Kardashian West had children this way, ditto Sarah Jessica Parker; a few years back, Lucy Liu was open about picking elective “gestational surrogacy”, being busy. “It just seemed like the right option for me because I was working and I didn’t know when I was going to be able to stop.”

Surrogacy remains marginally available in the UK and not just because of the cost

Continue reading...

from Pregnancy | The Guardian https://ift.tt/3vef8gI

الجمعة، 21 مايو 2021

My mum escaped the cruelty of Ireland’s mother and baby homes. I might not be alive if she hadn’t

While writing about the notorious laundries for ‘fallen women’, novelist Esther Freud was chilled to discover how close her own mother came to ending up in one

My mother’s relationship with her parents was uneasy. Born into a strict Irish Catholic family, she’d been evacuated as a baby, sent to a convent boarding school at seven, and when, at 18, she found herself pregnant, she was so fearful of their condemnation that she kept the news a secret. It was some years later that a relative saw her in London at a bus stop with two small girls and wrote to her parents: I didn’t know your daughter was married!

But my mother wasn’t married. At 17, soon after her family had moved back to Ireland after a lifetime running pubs in London, she’d fallen in love with my father, the painter Lucian Freud, and the bohemian world that he frequented. It was the early 60s, and, as innocent as a Catholic girl was raised to be, it wasn’t long before she was pregnant. At first she was delighted – there’d be someone of her own to love – but her euphoria was soon tinged with worry. She’d heard rumours of what could happen to a girl like her, made to work in laundries, locked away in homes (she’d spent the last year of her education at a convent outside Cork), and she was seized with fear that this could be her fate. She risked one last trip to Ireland, disguising her five-month bump, and didn’t go again.

The girls were warned never to speak of their misfortune, to keep the shame of it to themselves

It was God’s punishment, they were told, and none of this would have come about if they’d kept their legs together

Continue reading...

from Pregnancy | The Guardian https://ift.tt/3ucFw9n

Asthma in toddlers linked to in-utero exposure to air pollution, study finds

Developing foetuses ‘exquisitely sensitive’ to harm from tiny particles, scientists say

Infants whose mothers were exposed to higher levels of tiny air pollution particles during pregnancy are much more likely to develop asthma, according to research.

The study analysed the impact of ultra-fine particles (UFPs), which are not regulated by governments. These are thought to be even more toxic than the larger particles that are routinely monitored and have also been linked to asthma.

Continue reading...

from Pregnancy | The Guardian https://ift.tt/3fEr0SD

Naomi Campbell’s motherhood is good news, but most women don’t have her reproductive choices | Zeynep Gurtin

While we don’t know the details about Campbell’s situation, we do know that for most older women, their options are limited

Earlier this week, supermodel Naomi Campbell created a social media storm by posting a picture of her hand cradling a small baby’s feet with the caption: “A beautiful little blessing has chosen me to be her mother.”

While thousands congratulated Campbell, 50, on her newfound motherhood, many others raised critical voices, commenting on her age. Since the post doesn’t provide any details regarding whether Campbell gave birth, adopted the baby, or commissioned a surrogate’s services, there was also widespread speculation about how the baby was conceived, carried and delivered.

Zeynep Gurtin is a lecturer in women’s health at University College London

Continue reading...

from Pregnancy | The Guardian https://ift.tt/3wsYMkB

الأربعاء، 19 مايو 2021

We should teach children about miscarriage during sex ed. Here’s why | Jessica Zucker

A reported one in four pregnancies will end in miscarriage. Yet miscarriage, like abortion, is not included in most curricula

Kelsey Christensen, 29, has been a health teacher at a public school in Maryland for three years. Part of her job is to teach sex education to her students, and she spends a good portion of her summer writing sex ed curricula. Yet, it never occurred to her to question why miscarriage and infant loss aren’t included in sex education until she experienced a miscarriage at 10 weeks along in her pregnancy last summer.

“It just wasn’t on my radar to even bring up to my students and it hasn’t been something that’s been brought up at school to discuss,” Christensen told me. But Christensen says her students will often ask her about miscarriage, usually after someone in their family experiences a pregnancy loss.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had to reassure a couple that nothing they did caused their miscarriage

Jessica Zucker is a Los Angeles-based psychologist specializing in reproductive and maternal mental health and the creator of the #IHadaMiscarriage campaign. Her first book is now available I HAD A MISCARRIAGE: A Memoir, a Movement (Feminist Press + Penguin Random House Audio)

Continue reading...

from Pregnancy | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2S6Zxki

الثلاثاء، 18 مايو 2021

Naomi Campbell becomes a mother – and shares photo

Supermodel releases images of herself on social media cradling the feet of her ‘beautiful little blessing’

Supermodel Naomi Campbell has announced that she has become a mother.

Campbell, 50, shared a photograph of her hand cradling a pair of tiny feet on Twitter and Instagram on Tuesday afternoon, with the caption: “A beautiful little blessing has chosen me to be her mother.”

Continue reading...

from Pregnancy | The Guardian https://ift.tt/33RLth5

الاثنين، 17 مايو 2021

Parent trap: why the cult of the perfect mother has to end

Worldwide, mothers are overworked, underpaid, often lonely and made to feel guilty about everything from epidurals to bottle feeding. Fixing this is the unfinished work of feminism

It’s the middle of a dark, November night, and I’m about to have my first baby. But instead of the joyful experience I’d hoped for, I am being rushed into the operating theatre to have an emergency caesarean under general anaesthetic. I have a dangerous complication and my son’s life is at risk. Four hours earlier, I’d been sent home by a midwife who told me I couldn’t stay in hospital and have an epidural because labour wasn’t properly “established”.

It’s a week later and I’m back home with my son who, thankfully, made it. But I’m struggling. If someone asks me how I am, in a kindly voice, my voice cracks. I’m spending a lot of time sitting on the bed in a milk-stained dressing gown. In a few days, my partner will go back to work.

At a time when women are supposed to be more liberated than ever before, modern motherhood has become rigidly perfectionist

Natural motherhood is exclusively presented as woman-centred. Midwives are portrayed as helping women achieve the drug-free births everyone is assumed to want

Continue reading...

from Pregnancy | The Guardian https://ift.tt/3uYzoCH

الأربعاء، 12 مايو 2021

I supported other women to have babies, but faced my own battle alone | Cherisse Buzacott for IndigenousX

As an Aboriginal woman, I felt the expectation to have children. All the while, I was in a battle which many face alone

I told myself once I had my career, I would start a family. In my experience, in the Aboriginal context, there is the silent expectation to raise children. Culture relies on the expansion of our families to carry on our practices, our obligation to care for land and to care for our elders and ourselves when we grow old. I come from a relatively small family, in comparison to most, with a larger extended family. My grandparents had more than 10 siblings.

There is no question whether we will have kids, it’s more the matter of when. So often there is no consideration as to how.

Continue reading...

from Pregnancy | The Guardian https://ift.tt/3uErIWa

الاثنين، 10 مايو 2021

A maddening grief: my year of miscarriages and how I got through it

Navigating an uncharted landscape, I found solace in an unlikely place

After my third consecutive miscarriage I began baking bread.

This was 2019, a year and change before quarantine boredom ignited a sourdough craze that lit up everyone’s lockdown Instagram feeds with images of fresh and hot loaves.

Five months in, I dream of smashing up the waiting room

I see myself fully: the sad proprietress of New York City’s loneliest bakery

Continue reading...

from Pregnancy | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2Q2RwMA

الأحد، 9 مايو 2021

Monzo bank to offer employees paid leave after pregnancy loss

Either partner can take up to 10 days’ leave after miscarriage, stillbirth or abortion in UK digital bank’s policy

The online bank Monzo has become one of the first UK companies to offer paid leave for employees who are affected by the loss of a pregnancy.

Part of the bank’s mental health drive, the move follows the departure of its founder and former chief executive, Tom Blomfield, who stepped down in January in the wake of his own struggles with anxiety and stress.

Continue reading...

from Pregnancy | The Guardian https://ift.tt/3hecbsr

السبت، 8 مايو 2021

The chemical question: does focusing on hormones undermine mental healthcare?

According to some, not factoring hormone fluctuation into women’s mental healthcare can be dangerous. For others, it feeds into outdated stereotypes

“It’s my hormones, doc. It’s my hormones, and no one’s listened to that.”

It was the late 1980s, in what was once Royal Park Psychiatric Hospital in inner-city Melbourne. A brash young registrar doing her training in psychiatry had arrived at her first hospital placement, full of ideas and enthusiasm. Perhaps to put a bit of scuff on that bright ambition, she was assigned to look after the female patients in the “back ward”.

What keeps me up are the mothers [who] end their lives because they have such horrendous symptoms

The pharmaceutical industry has a huge interest in this being a medical illness that they can sell us an expensive drug to fix

Embrace the bio-psychosocial approach, because that then means you will look at everything

Bianca Nogrady is a freelance science journalist, author and broadcaster. This is an edited extract from Griffith Review – States of Mind, out now

Continue reading...

from Pregnancy | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2R8dJcB

الجمعة، 7 مايو 2021

Pregnant women in UK ‘passed from pillar to post over choice of vaccine’

Women face confusion, delays and wasted trips with GPs in no position to offer a choice, say doctors

Organisations representing obstetricians, GPs and midwives say the system to let people choose their vaccines is not viable, with pregnant women being passed “from pillar to post” as they try to book jabs.

As the government announced that people under 40 would also be offered an alternative to the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine where possible, the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists (RCOG) said the system for pregnant women – who are advised to have the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines – was not working.

Continue reading...

from Pregnancy | The Guardian https://ift.tt/3uuHW43

الأربعاء، 5 مايو 2021

‘The process is shockingly void of communication’: how a graphic novel aims to illuminate IVF

Two Week Wait is Luke and Kelly Jackson’s response to the challenges of fertility treatment – beyond the medical facts

A man stands in the doorway of a bathroom, brushing his teeth. His wife lies in bed, reading. “So… ummm… are we going to…?” she asks. He pauses for a moment, then enters the bedroom. They have a conversation about sex, ovulation, cycles. It’s clinical, almost business-like.

So begins Two-Week Wait, a graphic novel following a couple, Joanne and Conrad, on their journey towards parenthood. Based on the experiences of authors Kelly and Luke C Jackson, as well as people they interviewed, the book is a compelling, harrowing portrait of the difficulties faced by the one in 50 Australian couples trying to conceive.

Continue reading...

from Pregnancy | The Guardian https://ift.tt/3emOuMF