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Pregnancy and Lactation Weekly Digest

For the Week Ending December 4, 2022. 

COVID-19 Vaccines International Pregnancy Exposure Registry (C-VIPER)

More than 8,000 pregnant vaccinated women are already participating in our survey.

Help us understand the impact of COVID-19 vaccines on pregnancy and babies. Be a part of it!

Click here to Register

Stay up to date on your COVID vaccine to protect your newborn

Babies younger than 6 months old are not yet eligible for COVID shots, and they are hospitalized with COVID-related complications at higher rates than older kids. Read more here.

This is important for you because staying up to date on your vaccinations can help keep your baby healthy even after she’s born.

Soothe to sleep

Shocking scientific breakthrough: walking while carrying your baby, then sitting with her, can soothe her to sleep. Read more here.

This is important for you because when you are willing to try literally anything to get that baby to sleep–this is a pretty easy (and cheap) trick.

Matrilineal societies are good for moms’ health

In matrilineal societies–where inheritance passes from the mother to the children instead of through the father–women tend to be healthier than in patrilineal societies. (Men seem to fare the same either way.) The researchers who found this speculate that it is because women in these societies have greater agency and autonomy as well as more robust and supportive social networks. Alas, such societies are rare. Read more here.

This is important for you because (a) cultural views on gender have a measurable effect on girls’ health and behavior, and (b) taking as much control of your life as you can, even in our culture, can improve your health.

Babies might be more imaginative than we realized

Between ten and fourteen months of age babies develop the ability to consider multiple alternatives to explain what they see–an essential component of planning their future courses of action. Read more here.

This is important for you because babies are always learning and assimilating their environments, well before they can tell us about it. Act accordingly.

The most popular article on The Pulse this week was Options for Male Birth Control. 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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