As every expecting parent learns to their dismay, modern medicine cannot accurately predict when your baby will arrive. The optimistically named “due date” is, from a predictive standpoint, fiction. Only 5% of births occur on the actual due date, and about two-thirds fall within a week before or after the due date. Not knowing when […]

Whenever I think about pregnancy weight gain, I think of Renée Zellweger playing Bridget Jones, the role that catapulted her to true stardom—and for which she had to gain some 30 lbs. After losing the weight and then regaining it for the second Bridget Jones film, Zellweger was fed up with the yo-yo-ing. She griped […]

Red raspberry leaf tea is an ancient tonic—pregnant women as early as the 6th century drank the stuff. It is still a popular herbal supplement for pregnancy today, with claimed benefits ranging from it’s ability to strengthen the uterus and help prepare the body for birth to directly stimulating labor (in one survey, more than […]

Call me naive, but I went into my first pregnancy expecting that after having my baby, the extra pounds would more or less fall off on their own. It was a huge wake up call, when a year out, I was still a steady 5 lbs above my pre-baby weight. My son was finally sleeping […]

If you’re pregnant or planning to be pregnant, chances are you’ve heard stories about what might happen to your nether regions during a vaginal birth. Perhaps you’ve heard about tearing during delivery or even heard the term episiotomy. Tearing naturally during labor is super common (over 80% of women will experience tearing to some degree). […]

Let me just start by saying: due dates are total BS. If you already tried out another due date calculator, there’s a good chance it was wrong. The date your doctor gave you? Wrong. So now what? We built a better due date calculator! Ours includes a few more data points so you can more […]

Last month, the measles outbreak in Washington State prompted its governor to declare a state of emergency. Some parents have wised up and finally vaccinated their kids. But others have dug in, even gathering to protest universal vaccine policies. As a researcher who knows how thoroughly the autism-vaccine hypothesis has been debunked*, it’s hard to watch […]

There is no other organ quite like the uterus. If men had such an organ they would brag about it. So should we.” – Ina May Gasken Let’s talk about the uterus. All of us lived inside one at some point of our lives. Many of us have the great luck to use ours to […]

Since 2002, The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) has recommended that doctors screen all pregnant women for Group B Strep between 35-37 weeks, and that all women who test positive receive IV antibiotics during labor. This policy has more than halved the rate of early onset newborn GBS disease (GBS infection occurring within the first […]

Have you had a sneaking suspicion that your contractions get worse* at night? Maybe it feels like your pregnant body just wants to find another way to wake you up in the middle of the night. Maybe you haven’t felt them but wake up on feeling like you just ran a marathon. If you fall […]

When a close friend was trying for a second child in her late 30s, her husband mentioned that all the mothers he saw at the playground seemed old enough to be grandmas. Naturally, she was stung… but not surprised. Her experience is all too familiar. Our society tends to view older-age parenting–well, really older motherhood–as […]

It’s never fun to hear that your placenta is in the wrong spot. Honestly, I didn’t even know that was a possibility until my 20 week ultrasound when the sonographer told me I had a low lying placenta. In her words: “Not technically placenta previa but your placenta is very close to your cervical opening […]