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Pregnancy and Lactation Weekly Digest

For the Week Ending July 23, 2017.

Serena

In August 1991, Annie Leibowitz created a stir with her photo of a nude and pregnant Dem Moore on the cover of Vanity Fair. For the August 2017 issue, Leibowitz chose a photo of a nude and pregnant Serena Williams. Williams and her fiancé Alexis Ohanian, the cofounder of Reddit, are expecting their first baby this summer. Read more here.

This is important for you because it’s a pretty spectacular photo. You should check it out.

Freezing Ovarian Tissue Instead of Eggs

Women freeze their eggs so they can get pregnant later for different reasons, most commonly if they are getting treated for cancer (see more about this here). But egg freezing does not have a very high success rate – only about a quarter of frozen eggs yield babies. Ovarian tissue freezing is an experimental procedure that is being considered as an alternative; once the tissue is transplanted later, some women could conceive naturally. Read more here.

This is important for you because if you need to delay childbearing, this may be an option worth examining.

Preeclampsia is expensive

Preeclampsia, a complication of pregnancy characterized by high maternal blood pressure, is a leading cause of morbidity and mortality in both mothers and newborns worldwide (see ho to recognize and avoid it here). The American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology has just analyzed how much it costs in terms of dollars, and the number is not trivial. Read it here.

This is important for you because if you have preeclampsia, make sure it is dealt with appropriately.

The most popular article on The Pulse this week was How Women Get Pregnant: Myths and Theories Over Time. Plato, while clearly on top of philosophical and metaphysical matter though that the uterus would move around in a woman’s body unless she was pregnant. Read it here.

Diana Gitig
Dr. Diana Gitig has a Ph.D. in cell biology and genetics from Cornell University, and has been writing about issues in biology – from molecular biology to cancer to immunology to neuroscience to nutrition to agriculture - for the past fifteen years. She has three teenaged children.

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