Exposure to vehicular and industrial emissions heightens risk during pregnancy, researchers say
Exposure to air pollution may increase the risk of stillbirth, new research suggests.
Stillbirths, classed as such if a baby is born dead after 24 weeks of pregnancy, occur in one in every 200 births. Around 11 babies are stillborn every day in the UK, with aproximately 3,600 cases a year.
Continue reading...What’s the best style statement you can make while pregnant?
Charlotte, by email
Continue reading...What to Expect When You’re Expecting is the title of a particular sort of pregnancy self-help book that has been circulating for years on both sides of the Atlantic (originally published in 1984, it is now in its fourth edition). Full of colour pictures and To Do lists, it is also a grim warning of everything that can go wrong for the pregnant body, from the supposed risks of ingesting mayonnaise to amniocentesis. It is in many ways a conservative and rather dated product of a boom industry, full of drawings of well-fed, straight Anglo-Saxon couples.
These days, things have shifted a little. The particular, rather stolid, sometimes jokey, stereotypes of heterosexuals having babies that have saturated the media for decades – remember Knocked Up, Parenthood, the TV show Thirtysomething; Parenting magazine? – seem a world away from the sliding sexual identities of Transparent. Maggie Nelson’s book The Argonauts, is a whole generation on from, say, Jayne Anne Philips’s MotherKind. Even Tina Cassidy’s Birth, a superb account of the medical history of pregnancy, was written straight up. Nowadays, birth control applies to how one might control making a baby as well as how not to.
Related: The foul reign of the biological clock | Moira Weigel
Related: The row about abortion term limits is demeaning to pregnant women | Chitra Ramaswamy
Continue reading...One in five mothers suffers from a mental health problem, such as depression, anxiety or psychosis, during pregnancy or in the first year after childbirth
When Kathryn Grant found out she was pregnant with her first child, she was ecstatic. But nine months later, after a difficult labour, she developed a severe psychosis and needed hospitalised for several months.
“The hallucinations and delusions that I suffered were horrific,” she says. “Psychosis for me was all around death and the end of the world. I hallucinated that I was being burned alive.”
Related: How A&E could offer round-the-clock support to mental health patients
Continue reading...I wasted years with x!” I have never heard a straight man say this. But when a woman does, after a breakup, everyone immediately understands what she means. We are raised to believe that female bodies are time bombs. Any relationship that does not “work out” – which is to say, does not get a woman pregnant by a man committed to helping her raise their offspring – brings her closer to her expiration date. At the stroke of midnight, our eggs turn into dust.
Women in many times and places have felt pressure to bear children. But the idea of the biological clock is a recent invention. It first appeared in the late 1970s. “The Clock Is Ticking for the Career Woman,” the Washington Post declared, on the front page of its Metro Section, on 16 March 1978. The author, Richard Cohen, could not have realised just how inescapable his theme would become.
Male fertility declines with age too. A growing body of research has shown that sperm counts diminish over the years
The biological clock's cultural role was to counteract the effects of women’s liberation
This seems a strange form of empowerment: spending tens of thousands of dollars to make your date feel more comfortable
Continue reading...In the past five years states have passed numerous abortion restrictions, causing women to travel farther, wait longer and spend more. What’s your experience?
It’s no secret that US abortion rights are in a state of total upheaval. In the last five years, states have passed as many new abortion restrictions as were passed in the entire preceding 15 years. Those laws have helped shut down a quarter of the country’s abortion clinics. And now, women who get abortions are traveling farther, waiting longer and spending more.
But while these laws have been fiercely debated in statehouses and in the media, the women who are impacted don’t always get a voice.
Continue reading...Scientists have maintained the life of human embryos outside the womb for 13 days. Or, as they might put it, have grown blastocysts on an “in vitro implantation platform” to the brink of mesoderm formation. Whatever. It’s a big deal.
Related: It’s time to extend the 14-day limit for embryo research | John Harris
If only other disciplines, like technology or economics, could be as carefully considered and well-regulated as science
Related: Violent anti-choice rhetoric must end, or anti-abortion violence never will
Continue reading...