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Pregnancy and Lactation Weekly Digest

For the Week Ending November 22, 2020. 

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!

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Wearing your baby to work

Genoa Warner is an environmental health scientist & reproductive toxicologist; she studies how chemicals in the environment affect the female reproductive system. And she wore not one, but both of her babies to work in the lab–and to work at home after the coronavirus pandemic hit. Read more here.

This is important for you because if she could wear her baby in a sling in a toxicology lab, you can pretty much do it anywhere.

NIPT

The American Society of Obstetricians and Gynecologists and the Society for Maternal-Fetal Medicine just recommended that all pregnancies be screened with Non-Invasive Prenatal Testing (NIPT). This technology sequences the fetal DNA floating around in mom’s blood and allows doctors to screen for chromosomal abnormalities at only ten weeks into a pregnancy. Read more here.

This is important for you because noninvasive is always a good quality in diagnostic tests.

Periods Gone Public

If you think people are squeamish about breastfeeding in public, don’t even try getting them to talk about periods (a prerequisite to breastfeeding in public). In this book Jennifer Weiss-Wolf argues for “period equity.” She thinks that periods should not be stigmatized because they are, as she points out, the most normal thing in the world. Read more here

This is important for you because although you may be trying not to think about it, you will get your period again one day!

Female Ejaculations

Yup, it happens. Nope, we don’t know exactly why. Like semen, female ejaculate (or one form of it, anyway) contains prostate specific antigen (PSA). In males, PSA helps sperm swim; it is not at all clear what it’s doing in females. Read more here.

This is important for you because duh.

The most popular article on The Pulse this week was Are You a New Mom on a Budget? If You Are, Read This. 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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