Pregnancy and Lactation Weekly Digest
For the Week Ending January 10, 2021
More than 12,000 pregnant and recently pregnant women are already participating. Help us understand the impact of COVID-19 on pregnancy and babies. Be a part of it!
Click here to Register.
Those myths of Amazon huntresses didn’t come out of nowhere. Ancient women across the world hunted along with men, they didn’t only gather. Anthropologists and archeologists always just kind of assumed ancient hunters were male because… well, because they were male and couldn’t really imagine it otherwise. Read more here.
This is important for you because, as archeologist Christine Lee at Cal State put it, past archaeologists often “clung to this very 20th century view…that if a woman was pregnant she couldn’t hurl an atlatl (a spear-throwing lever) or that if she was carrying children she couldn’t use a bow-and-arrow.” Silly of them.
Giving birth is always dramatic, traumatic, miraculous; but it is especially so in a pandemic. For one mother, bringing a new life into a world so suffused with death rekindled her closeness to a God from whom she had drifted over the course of her pregnancy. Read more here.
This is important for you because “bitterness is consumed by hope. That is the gift of new life. It is always the gift of new life, in any and all conditions, but especially in times of great pain and of growing cynicism.”
Single celled organisms can reproduce either sexually, like we do–combining their genes with those from another cell–or just by cloning themselves. They tend to prefer the latter; it is infinitely simpler. But they can have sex, and always have – even though they don’t genders. Read more here.
This is important for you because “Once you stand back and see the full diversity of ways that organisms reproduce, it makes you realize that the stereotypical view of sex we have involving males and females is just one slice of the pie.”
