Pregnancy Brain: It’s Real and It’s Finally Mapped
It’s 2024 and we are just getting a comprehensive map of how the brain changes (in significant ways!) during pregnancy.
The maternie Database:
We collect a lot of women’s health news, every weekday. This is where you’ll find everything we’ve rounded up and reported on pregnancy. Want to get this news in your inbox, as soon as we find it? Sign up above.
It’s 2024 and we are just getting a comprehensive map of how the brain changes (in significant ways!) during pregnancy.
Hundreds of female Customs and Border Protection employees filed suit against the agency, saying they were discriminated against once they announced they were pregnant.
Federal health records found “more than 100 pregnant women in medical distress who sought help from emergency rooms were turned away or negligently treated since 2022.”
Congressional Democrats found OBGYNs “are seeing more pregnant patients with dangerous medical complications two-plus years after the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision, while at the same time receiving less training as residents about how to perform abortions.”
States have increased funding for antiabortion centers (which lie about health care options) by $500 million since Roe vs Wade was overturned
Republican VP candidate JD Vance has repeatedly criticized people and politicians for not having children
The dark history of the people who sold women the “natural childbirth” movement.
Roberts goes deep into criticizing people without children
One of the main recommendations is bringing mental health care into “all relevant perinatal settings.”
Senate Democrats called out Republicans for proposing a federal pregnancy database.
The story of cognitive neuroscientist Liz Chirastil, who made herself a guinea pig in her own experiment by getting 26 MRIs throughout her pregnancy and for two years after.
The so-called clinics promote “abortion pill reversal,” which doesn’t have medical or scientific evidence to back it up.
Erin Hirshberg writes a devastating but beautiful essay on having a stillbirth at 36 weeks
a deep dive on why hospitals are closing OBGYN units throughout the country, and the answer isn’t the fall of Roe making obstetrical care legally dangerous. It’s far simpler than that: money.
Supreme Court justices seemed split mainly along ideological lines during oral arguments over a federal requirement that hospitals provide emergency care to stabilize a patient, including abortions when necessary.
A study of over 2 million teenagers in Canada found that those who carried a pregnancy to term were more than twice as likely to die before their 31st birthday, even after controlling for pre-existing health conditions and other demographics.
The United States’ maternal mortality rate is the worst in the world among wealthy countries. But a new analysis of CDC statistics makes the case that the rate is around 10 deaths per 100,000 births—not the nearly 33 deaths per 100,000 births reported around this time last year.
Smart ring Oura is introducing a new pregnancy feature, which will allow wearers to track gestational age and “offer weekly updates on what physiological changes are expected,” like “unusual sleep patterns and heart rate differences.”
A deep dive on Idaho becoming an “OBGYN desert.” At the end of March, the third labor and delivery unit in the state will close since Roe fell.
There is a “four week window where a person might not be pregnant yet—but according to how we measure weeks of pregnancy they already are.”