Pregnancy
Education Week - Mommy-hood trophies
There are no ‘Grammy-awards’ for
women who survive pregnancy, childbirth and breast-feeding, snotty-noses,
potty-training and toddler-tantrums – at the cost of a slim waist, firm breasts
and dainty calf-muscles. Rather, women who are wrung through this process emerge
wearing droopy boobs, silver stretch-marks and a spare tyre.
This is “Pregnancy Education Week”.
While we celebrate magic moments that make motherhood so worthwhile, let’s
step back and think about how safe pregnancy and childbirth has become compared
to when the word pregnant was
whispered or disguised as ‘in the family way’. Travel writer, Carole Chester, writes
the following in her book: ‘Traveller’s Treasury – New York’
“Doctor’s
hardly touched Hiram’s life – but the deaths! Page after page of deaths. Letter
after letter recording them line by line. The gravestones of wives and infant
children haunt the cemeteries. Hiram was the first son of his father John’s
first marriage; my great-grandfather, Amasa, was the second son of John’s
second marriage; seven children by his first wife, eleven by his second;
fourteen surviving to adulthood. There are 105 graveyards in Gloucester and 135
next-door in Burrillville, monuments to childbed fever, consumption, pneumonia,
the epidemic diseases that raged the land, typhoid, smallpox, measles. For each
husband, a tatter of wives – dead at twenty-three, at twenty-eight, and
twenty-seven. To be a woman was an almost fatal early disease.”
Pretty scary stuff. Thanks to good
ante-natal care today, pregnancy problems can be identified and treated before
they become problematic. The focus of ‘Pregnancy Education Week’ is to make all women – irrespective of their social
status, income, age and culture – aware if the importance of going to her local
clinic, doctor, gynaecologist or obstetrician ASAP when her pregnancy test is
positive.
Why?
This is so that her medical and
obstetrical history can be recorded, blood tests taken to identify her blood
group, haemoglobin (testing for anaemia) and the presence of various viruses
that can affect her baby’s development in the first three months (possibly the
most important trimester of pregnancy).
Then a plan is set for medical
check-ups over the next nine months.
It is important that women stick to
her re-visit dates, and that she follows through with her doctor/midwives’ advice
and instructions throughout her pregnancy.
She can also help herself and her baby by:
- Not smoking
- Not drinking
- Exercising regularly
- Eating healthy
- Reading and learning more about each stage of pregnancy, how to stay healthy and prepare for the mammoth task of motherhood.
The effort is well worth it!
