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Pregnancy and Lactation Weekly Digest

For the Week Ending September 6, 2020. 

Were you tested for COVID-19 during Pregnancy or at birth?

If yes, complete Pregistry’s survey and help other women who are pregnant or contemplating becoming pregnant.

A collaboration of Pregistry and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

Click here to Register.

IVG

Not only does it follow IVF alphabetically, IVG–in vitro gametogenesis– follows its predecessor in vitro fertilization technologically. In IVG, researchers can generate gametes–sperm cells and egg cells– in the lab, obviating the need for sperm and egg donation and allowing any two individuals to become biological co-parents. In her new book Work Mate Marry Love: How Machines Shape Our Human Destiny, Debora L. Spar explores how technology has always defined sex, relationships, and reproduction, and how it is continuing to do so as it progresses. Read more here.

This is important for you because the definitions or conceptions of what technically makes a parent or a family may change, but a parent’s vital role in a child’s life never will.

How to Raise a Resilient Child

Going overboard in your zeal to be a “good” parent can have bad consequences. Too much care can prevent kids from taking their own risks and  facing their own challenges, depriving them of essential opportunities for  growth and triumph and ultimately causing anxiety and depression. To take the best care of them it is sometimes necessary to let them try things on their own, and even to watch them fail. This is how they (and we) learn. Read more here.

This is important for you because tempting as it is to always ease the way for your child, she eventually needs to figure out how to ease her own way- and she can’t if you’re always there. Even when she’s little.

Nesting

Everyone knows that pregnant women nest; they get this intense, compulsive, irrational, irresistible, hormonally-driven need to clean and organize everything in sight. But do they really? Turns out, there is no physiological evidence for such a phenomenon, in humans or in any other animals. Pregnant women do these things because society tells them they should; blaming it on biology makes it seem not sexist. Read more here.

This is important for you because go ahead, cull your linen closet and put together that nursery. But recognize that it could be due more to boredom if you’re home from work and anxiety about wanting to prepare for your baby’s arrival than it does to your endocrine system. Which means that your partner, and anyone else, can help.

The First Kick and Other Cartoons

When Maya, cartoonist Yehuda Devir’s wife, got pregnant, he knew exactly what to do: chronicle the whole experience with cartoons, from the positive test result all the way through their daughter Ariel’s birth. See them here.

This is important for you because it’s a great reminder that you’re not going through this alone, and humor is a great way to help you deal with all of the tumultuous changes in your body and your life.

The most popular article on The Pulse this week was Temperature Rise and other Normal Pregnancy Changes Confused with COVID-19. 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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