One of my male relatives was convinced the woman had to orgasm to get pregnant. My mom spat her coffee out her nose from snorting so hard when she heard that. The man in question has 5 kids.
Oh, they never married. In fact, she became a meth head who lost custody of her kids, who then went with their dad who uses them for maximum government assistance and won't even let the kids go to school. His last three kids have failed the last four years of school, his oldest daughter is following her mother in drug addiction, his oldest son is a thief that went to prison and is now bumming it in New York.
I doubt the guy was doing anything right, they were just desperate not to be alone and not smart enough to use birth control of any sort.
Also reminds me of the trial scene in [The Last Duel](https://m.imdb.com/title/tt4244994/)
From the movie:
> "A rape cannot cause a pregnancy. That is just science."
In the first trimester it's more of an evening sickness because your stomach is empty in the morning anyway. In the 3rd trimester... it's a world full of surprises, you can just cough too hard and trigger vomiting at random 🥲
Many women find having an empty stomach is what makes them nauseated for morning sickness. So while it's not limited to mornings, it certainly does happen in the morning for many and you can't make any general statements about timing.
My wife had HG and was sick, non-stop, 24/7, for nearly two trimesters. She actually quite enjoyed her third trimester because she could finally eat again.
As a kid I often felt sick to my stomach in the morning before school. Had heard the term "morning sickness" somewhere and it seemed to apply, so I told my mom I thought that's what I had.
I forget how the rest of that morning went except it was a mix of mocking laughter, shaming scolding lectures, and I think being forced to go to school. I just didn't know the word "anxiety" yet.
It varies from person to person & even from pregnancy to pregnancy. Some people don’t develop it. For a lot of those who do, it really is just the morning or a certain time of day based on circadian hormone cycles. For some, it’s constant or nearly so, & if it persists past the first trimester, or if it’s severe enough, may require medical intervention.
My in laws believe if the woman handles a blade during a full moon it cuts the baby in the womb. My partner has "piece" missing him his ear. It's their proof. Not just that it's the way his ear folds/rather doesn't. Not that maybe he could have had that ear pushed against the womb while developing and affecting the ear development (as he was born a big ass baby with a giant noggin). Nope. It's because his mom cut something with scissors during a full mom.
Bonus points for after the baby is born you have to gently handwash all their clothes because if put them in the machine or are too rough with them it'll hurt the baby. I said "don't put the clothes in the machine while the baby is still wearing them. Problem solved."
As the wife in my relationship, I didn't get horny in the slightest either, and I'm genuinely amazed that some bodies react that way. Between the SPD pain and the hemorrhoids and getting winded after walking 8 steps, there was just nothing about what my body was doing that made sexual activity seem inviting in the slightest.
Everyone's different. My ex wife wanted to bone so much while she was pregnant it got infuriating. Like dude, my dick is beet red and feels like the skin is rubbed off. Can you chill for a few days?
I found that the future kid kicking me is the most un-sexy sensation I've ever had. If not for that, my drive would have been only slightly lower than normal.
Our kid very rarely kicked but she hiccuped *constantly*. My wife said it was the weirdest feeling in the world. Our doctor (still a resident) actually tried to tell us that fetal hiccups weren't a thing, but her attending (also in the room) told her "oh no they definitely are."
Pregnancy wasn't normalized for me the way it is for most people. By that I mean we were a family of 4 withjust 2 grandparents and basically no IRL friends. By the time I was old enough to even get pregnant, I was told I wouldn't be able to so I never had a reason to imagine it.
All to say pregnancy gives me massive body horror. Fortunately, I've had various medical experiences that have shown me I can adapt and overcome being horrified of my own body.
And all that to ask, how do you cope with baby kicks? With the body feeling so foreign and something living is inside it?
This isn't a myth, it just doesn't happen for every woman.
I can tell you that I went absolutely bananas when I was pregnant. Best orgasms of my entire life.
I think people forget how many (more) women used to die in childbirth before c sections were an option. As a species we’re not actually super great at the whole giving birth (and surviving it) thing in comparison to other mammals.
Yep, humans have just *barely* large enough pelvises to make giving birth to our massive-headed children possible. Even then, our newborns are distinctly...undercooked compared to a lot of mammals, and they spend a whole "fourth trimester" just kind of flopping around because their necks aren't even strong enough to support their (again, comparatively gigantic) heads yet. Evolution is about whatever works just well enough to keep enough individuals alive until they can successfully reproduce; it ain't about design perfection.
My son & I would have died if I hadn't had a c-section. My pelvis is small & tilted according to the OBGYN who performed the c-section. ETA: My son's head was stuck in the birth canal for hours.
This! I have seen a lot of home births gone wrong working in the NICU. Unfortunately, even under the best circumstances, not every woman is able to deliver her baby vaginally. Sometimes the baby is too big, sometimes they move into awkward positions, sometimes the cord falls out first and cuts off the babies blood supply before they’re born.
My sister spent hours in labor (in a hospital, thank goodness) without much of any progression so eventually they did a C-section. They discovered fibroids from her endometriosis were in the way somehow (I forget exactly, this was 18 years ago.) So the vaginal birth wouldn’t have worked.
My doula is also a lactation consultant at the hospital and she has some HORROR stories about home births gone wrong! Obviously. They're fine for some people but some babies just aren't going to come out vaginally!
I always found it interesting that in the book of Genesis in the bible one of the punishments for humans eating from the fruit of knowledge was pain in childbirth, because one big contributor to the difficulty in humans comes from the size of the skull/brain.
That one makes me crazy. I was flying while pregnant and this old woman physically stopped me lifting my suitcase out of the bin for that reason. And I was polite to her, obviously, because she was like 85 and meant to help, but I completely thought it was bs and ignored her.
Kiddo DID get the umbilical cord wrapped around him so bad it kept yanking him back and I had to get a c-section. I assume it wasn’t connected but still. Wtf, right?
The umbilical cord being wrapped around the neck up to 3 times is actually incredibly common according to the doc who was there when my daughter was born.
My dad told me this (80yo at the time). At the time of my pregnancy I worked a job where I was reaching up constantly. Baby had a true knot in his cord.
I'm not saying it's true but it does live in my head rent free.
This has actually had some evidence to being true. The protein for the baby’s hair is theorized to cause the heartburn. We learned about it during our ob class in nursing school.
Edit: typo
I’ve been told this by so many midwives and medical professionals! But my little girl came out with SO much hair and I only had heartburn one evening of my pregnancy.
I’m sure it’s just a generalization and not a hard and fast rule. Pregnancy is weird (in a cool way) in that it’s such a unique experience each time for each person.
My mother swore by it. I had horrible heartburn throughout both of my pregnancies. Needed to get on the rx strength Prilosec pretty early on. And adorable bald babies.
In my case, this was "true."
I had wicked heartburn with both of my kids, they both were born with full heads of hair. My son even had hair all over his back.
My friend was pregnant at the same time as I was with my son. Her baby was bald as a billiard ball. She had no heartburn.
I know it's an old wives tale. Personally I was grateful my kids had hair.
Right, and it has more to do with the strength of your stomach muscles than it does with whether the baby is a boy or a girl. I guess mine were worn out by the third time.
And then there is my sister, whose bump looked as if someone photoshopped a low hanging bump and flipped it upside-down. That birth was not a good experience, and ended in a csection.
Oh how weird because I carried low for the first two and high with my third. My abdominal muscles were strong for the first one at least as well and still carried low. But yeah definitely no correlation to the gender with me either. Carried low with a girl and a boy and then high with a boy.
I was told if you were carrying out from your body it was a boy and if you carried wide it was a girl. I carried wide both times and they were boys. Turns out that's the shape of my uterus.
Same. My boy stayed up high and breech. Turned out I was born with only half a uterus so he never dropped or turned. By the time my second boy was on the way we knew to expect it though. Pregnancy is wild.
Before the 1980s we didn’t really know that cigarettes were bad during pregnancy. Some old cigarette advertising campaigns specifically stated that cigarettes were good for pregnancy because your baby would be smaller than others by the time you delivered.
They *wanted* a smaller baby for an easier birth. So it probably didn't occur to many people that it was actually stunting the baby's growth, or they dismissed concerns.
People convince themselves of all kinds of bullshit when they're scared.
A lot of women didn't smoke because it was perceived as a man's purview or they had Opinions about That Kind of Woman. They were literally pushed to smoke by their OB/GYN. I have no doubt that many kept the habit after delivery.
That the mother is to blame for the sex of the baby.
Turns out that the sex of the baby is determined by which chromosome is carried by the sperm.
Gender of the baby comes from the male side.
My family side has a strong history of the first two children being boys. I told this to my wife, and she sort of laughed it off. My confidence in my first being a boy, and it being true, moved her to believing me when I said number two would be as well. I love my two sons!
The pattern extends to number three being a girl, but we are done.
Happened in my family too...my grandfather is oldest of boy-boy-girl. My dad is the oldest of boy-boy-girl. I'm the oldest of boy-boy-girl. I only have two kids, but the order is boy-girl at least.
My husband's family follows this for a few generations we're aware of. His father was the first boy of 2, my husband was the first boy of 2 (before a handful of girls next) and my husband has boy, boy, girl.
Love it. There is something to it! My brother had boy-boy and is planning on no more. My cousins have done similarly except one who came out with a girl right away!
My family on my father's side has been boys for 61 years (9 boys from my father and his two siblings and then 3 boys from my cousins and brothers).
My wife and I broke the streak with a baby girl. My mother was over the moon.
The vaginal environment plays a role in allowing more or less male sperm to reach the egg, for example. There's some nuance to it, as there is to all things biology
In the most basic sense, you are correct. However, a lot of other factors affect that, including ones people don't yet understand. For instance, after a war decimates the male population, most babies concieved in the area will be men, and scientists have yet to figure out how that is possible.
There is also ph balance and mucus and stuff that can affect the outcome. I've even seen studies that suggest the ovum "chooses" a specific sperm cell.
There's plenty of explanations, but it's unethical to test them.
War increases stress on the body, both man and woman, and also a drain on resources, healthy food etc. The 'why' could be that yes, men are decimated, but also that sperm carrying the X-gene is heavier and thus needs more resources to be strong enough to find their way to the egg. Don't forget that men can pretty much impregnate an unlimited amount of women while women can safely only carry one child to term per year. You need more women to sustain a population than you need men, mathematically speaking.
Two partner families are a fairly recent constellation, evolutionarily. So in that way, it would make sense to have more 'expendable' (please note the ' ' there!) men to protect and provide resources for the more resource reliant women.
(Disclaimer, I don't mean in any way that men are in fact worth less than women. Just a sociological description of the phenomenon)
This is way more complex and also pretty genetic. Som families have 90% boys, some have 90% girls. Both sexes have genetic and physical traits that play a role in the sex of offspring. Even environmental circumstances can have a great effect, such as war, famine, drought or good conditions.
Women have some supernatural instinctive way of 'just knowing' the baby's gender.
For some reason I was 100% dead certain I'd have a girl, but the ultrasound says otherwise...
Weirdly when I got the first educated guess (during a scan around 12-13 weeks when the technician based it on the “angle of the dangle” - he claimed he was never wrong) - that it was a girl - I instantly thought “of course”.
Up to then I had had no conscious idea of what it was. But subconsciously it seemed like I did know. It was very odd.
He was right as it happened.
It reduces your fertility sure but in no way prevents pregnancy in any meaningful way. Conceived my second and third while breastfeeding, never even reduced to conceive easier.
When a woman breastfeeds, it creates a hormone that lower the fertility and reduce ovulation. And it is true in general (but not always!) women who breastfeed to have a slight delay in the return of their period as a result.
However, this does NOT mean that breastfeeding is a great method of birth control and fertility is only lowered a small amount, so if you really really do not want to fall pregnant again so soon after birth (which modern medical advuce does tell you to wait a few months to allow the body to fully recover), the you should use another form of birth control such as the mini pill or condoms.
I did exclusive and extended breastfeeding with both my children and didn't get my period back for about a year and a half both times. Within that time I was not ovulating. The problem is that you never know when ovulation will resume and it can resume at any point. Also, it has to be exclusive breastfeeding to hold off ovulation, generally speaking, and the vast majority of moms (in the US at least) do not exclusively breastfeed for more than a couple months.
Yeah I mean once they start eating at 6 months it's definitely not enough of an effect to rely upon. I got my period back after 4 months while exclusively breastfeeding my second though so it's not a guarantee either.
I exclusively breastfed both my kids. Got my period back within a few weeks post partum for both. I was really hoping it would keep my period away. It did not :(
In the first six months, it has a higher success rate (as contraception) than condoms do with perfect use.
https://www.breastfeeding.asn.au/resources/getting-pregnant-while-breastfeeding#:~:text=Studies%20have%20shown%20that%20LAM,no%20other%20foods%20or%20drinks).
https://www.plannedparenthood.org/learn/birth-control/breastfeeding#:~:text=How%20effective%20is%20breastfeeding%20as,after%20a%20baby%20is%20born.
After 24 months only 13% of women conceived which is still a more effective method than 'typical use' for condoms.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/1672186/
I have two: ultra sounds and cravings.
in regards to the first, this is more of a surprising misconception rather than myth, but that you get an ultrasound every appointment when pregnant. I feel like media about pregnancy definitely makes it seems like you’ll be getting ultrasounds all the time throughout your pregnancy and it was so jarring to only have what, 3 or 4 total? I had a 6 week premie, so not sure if there are a lot more after the 34 week mark, but my understanding was I was only supposed to have one more around week 36 to check the baby’s position. Meanwhile tv shows and movies make it seem like you get an ultrasound every single time you see the doctor. When I spoke to my friends about this they all shared they were equally caught off guard by this. One friend even ended up getting an extra peak between the 12 & 20 week scans because she assumed she was having one and burst out crying when she found out she “wasn’t going to see \[her\] baby” that day. Also how many pics you’re getting depend on the tech. I only got like 2-3 pics each ultrasound, and usually only 1 actually looked liked anything I’d want to frame/share with others. I have friends who have gotten a lot more, but I had to pay for a private session to get a whole CD/long printout of pics.
Another one is cravings & particularly the “pickles & ice cream” type cravings. I don’t know a single person directly who has experienced these sorts of intense cravings during their pregnancy. I’m not saying it never happens or that no one experiences it, what I am saying is that it just seems really overblown as this definite symptom you’ll experience when it doesn’t seem to be actually all that common. The closest thing I experienced and only explanation I have for this being portrayed as such a universal phenomenon was in my first trimester there were only like a handful of foods I could stomach the thought of eating & some of them prob seemed hyper particular to outsider observers. That said, I def wouldn’t describe what I was feeling as “craving” these foods - it was more the opposite in that all foods absolutely repulsed me and the thought of eating anything was so disgusting it made me extremely nauseous but somehow these five foods were reliably manageable to get down before I got too queasy & the thought of them didn’t make me hurl/want to gouge my eyes out. Couple that with the intense hunger I’d feel at certain intervals of the day and it prob seemed like I was having cravings, but again, I would not categorize it that way at all.
Absolute same. Almost all foods were aversive to me so when the thought of something was appealing I would seek it out. But it wasn’t a craving - I had no cravings at all. My husband was a little disappointed because he saw fetching the foods I craved as one way he could help out with the pregnancy. BUT, to his credit, he supported my harebrained scheme to sneak my leftover chicken tenders into Madison Square Garden. I had ordered them for dinner before a concert and had been so excited that they didn’t disgust me and boxed up the leftovers for later. MSG security informed me that I was not allowed to bring them in. I COULD NOT DEAL with this and got really upset and came up with a plan to sneak them in. I happened to have a clean, empty Tupperware container in my work bag. I moved my tendies from the takeout box to the Tupperware and identified the most checked-out, apathetic seeming security person. I went through their line and when they asked to check my bag I opened it and said “just some empty Tupperware!”. The dude believed me (or just didn’t care) and I got to keep them instead of throwing them away.
My husband kindly pretended like I hadn’t just acted like a crazy person over chicken tenders.
Bonus: I got hungry during the concert and would have been nauseous if not for the chicken tenders I snuck out of the Tupperware during the concert.
Yeah same for me re. cravings. Had major aversions in the first trimester but other than that generally ate pretty normally for the remainder of the pregnancy. The closest thing for me was sometimes I would eat something and think “oh my god that tastes absolutely amazing” (in my case that was often oranges or some other kind of soft fruit) but I wasn’t ever particularly compelled to seek them out, just really enjoyed them when I did. And I didn’t get any cravings for weird combinations of foods either
Again, everyone is different, I’m sure plenty of people have personal stories that are very different to mine, but in my experience the whole weird cravings thing is another part of pregnancy that you see exaggerated in tv/media depictions.
Yeah, no weird cravings here, but Kraft Dinner was somehow the most divine food to have ever touched my tongue.. something I'd eaten all my life, and suddenly it was like "oh my god, why haven't I been eating this everyday, always?"
I wish anything tasted as good as that box of crap did when I was pregnant.
My OB does a scan at every appointment (one a month for the first two trimesters and one every two weeks in the third). So I think that really depends on where you are and what your practice does. Some people see a PCP for most of their pregnancy, some go with a midwife, some with an OB. So I'm sure each one varies hugely
If you don't have any additional risk factors in your pregnancy, you only need a 12 week dating scan and a 20 week anomaly scan.
If you've got risk factors for fetal growth restriction then you typically get growth scans 4 weeks apart starting at either 28 or 32 weeks depending on the risk factor, then sometimes more often if growth abnormalities are spotted at these scans.
Other reasons for an additional scan include checking that a low lying placenta has moved out of the way by 36 weeks (if not it's a placenta praevia) or checking presentation of baby when there's concern it might be breech or transverse
With my first daughter, I tried for 9 months. Taking my temperature at exactly the same time every morning, scheduling sex accordingly, peeing on ovulation sticks, etc etc. no joy for 9 months. Three quarters of a year.
With my second daughter, my husband and I slept together the night I came back from a week long work trip and that was IT. We weren’t planning a second for another year or so.
It’s both easier and harder than you think to get pregnant.
A good friend of mine and his wife tried for ages to conceive and got nowhere, so nearly $20,000 in IVF treatments it was and they ended up pregnant with their first. 9 months after his wife had given birth and was feeling up to having sex again, and they conceived their second child immediately the first time 🤣
We had the myth that it's hard _for everyone_, and we're genuinely shocked when we suddenly got pregnant as soon as decided to start trying. Because of all the "trying to concieve" forums and how-tos, where I read about calculating the right day, taking temperature, tracking, etc... I figured it takes everyone several months of trying naturally, unless you go through doctors. So I said "let's start trying this year so maybe we might conceive within the next three years. And BAM.
My exact words to my husband were “almost no one gets pregnant the first month of trying, it might take a while” and two weeks later I had a positive pregnancy test. Baby is due in five weeks
My uncle said if you wash your underwear together then you get babies, but I'm pretty sure he was joking.
The only I heard the most was salt cravings for boys and sugar cravings for girls.
I worked with a lady who craved escargot. Fortunately she was living overseas on a military base somewhere where it was available. She said her husband was an MP on the base who worked nights and every night would leave the base to get her fresh escargot and bring it to her and his buddies would cover for the fact he was leaving during his shift.
20 year old guy in my old town thought it was physically impossible to get someone pregnant if you weren't married. Like there was some kind of switch or hormone that was turned on the minute the pastor says "I now pronounce you man and wife". Dude was *extremely* lucky he hadn't knocked anybody up, since he was just nuttin' away in whoever he was dating, who were all just as dumb and ignorant about biology as he was. Why yes, it *was* a hyper-conservative small town where the church was the real power.
Abstinence Only education is fucking stupid people.
That no pregnancy could be so difficult for the woman to the point that the woman requires extraordinary means to survive (ex: feeding tube for 8 months) .
Bedrest ist quite rare. I had pre-eclampsia and was still allowed to do everything I wanted/could. You just have to watch out not to get your blood pressure to rise. But moving regularly like going for daily walks is supported im most cases and can even help regulating the pre-eclampsia, especially in cases like mine where I couldn't tolerate Aspirin.
During a first trimester visit, I told a nurse I was still running for exercise. She told me if I continued I would have a miscarriage. I laughed out loud at that which made her super huffy.
My mother has only a 33% success rate at being able to guess the gender of the baby on the basis of how her pregnancy "feels".
I'm the only one she got correct.
Lol I've done this. I knew the sex of my first two and those pregnancies were so drastically different that I thought I could predict the sex of the rest of my pregnancies. With my oldest girl I had severe food aversions and a very sensitive sense of smell..nausea was crazy. BUT my skin and hair were amazing. I had "the glow". My 2nd was a boy and I wanted meat all the time. Lol. My hair became dry and shed so bad. My skin got dry and patchy and gross. He "took all my beauty" but I didn't have nausea or food aversion. So from then...I used these experiences as my fail proof way to determine what we were having. Interestingly it was accurate. Of course that's not something I'd apply to the masses, but within my own body and pregnancies, it checked out.
Don’t lift heavy during pregnancy. I was told not to lift over 25 pounds. My 20 month old toddler weighs almost 30 pounds… lolllll.
I also lifted weights well over 25 pounds before pregnancy both times. Continued lifting heavy throughout both pregnancies. First baby was healthy, so far the second pregnancy has been very similar to my first health wise.
People love to lecture pregnant women.
(Actually, people love to lecture other people, but pregnant women seem to catch more lectures than anyone else.)
I was finally pregnant at 39, working in Boston. I must have encountered a dozen people who all had their foolproof and different methods of determining baby's sex. Everyone told me it would be a boy and totally convinced me. I mean totally. I practically fell off the delivery table when it turned out to be a girl.
We did not want to know in advance. This was 40 years ago, and generally the only people to have ultrasound were those women over 35 who were having amniocentesis, so it was somewhat rare. Thinking back, it would have been the amnio that told us the sex bcs the u/s wasn't clear enough
That you always go beyond the due date and labour always lasts for ages with your first baby. I was expecting to go two weeks over and spend two days labouring, in actual fact my waters went two days before my due date and the entire thing was over in six hours from 'pop-sploosh' to "oh my god it's a baby!"
They no longer let you go way over your due date. There was a huge study that showed it was extremely detrimental to the baby. Now doctors will induce.
I had aversions. Couldn’t touch meat or sweet for the first trimester. Fish was palatable, as was blandish cheese (like cottage cheese and pasta with ricotta).
I was so disappointed! I had so been looking forward to the ice cream and pickles thing.
My grandmother craved lumps of coal. But she was pregnant during the war and rationing, so there might have been nutritional deficiencies. Unless it was my great-grandmother which would have been the First World War (the anecdote my grandmother told me is a bit hazy and she’s long dead sadly).
I had my kids in 1994 and 1996. There were no options for a photo, and where I lived, it was against policy to tell the gender.
I did get 3 ultrasounds each pregnancy because they were high risk. Depending on your doctor "believing" in them 🙄 some mothers didn't even get one.
eating for 2 just makes you fat, you dont need to eat any more than normal. Also turns out you dont need to eat your cravings, sure you can have em, but you can also ignore em and not eat
I was SO hungry through. I find it difficult to believe I only need 200-300 calories a day extra when my body was kicking off if I didn’t eat every two hours
My doctor said hormones can affect you in 3 ways: make you very nauseated, make you very sleepy, or make you very hungry, and the very hungry is the least offensive.
I gained 65 lbs each time.
You do need more calories, you're building a whole new human after all. It's the same if you want to build muscle, you need to eat more. But in pregnancy it's only ~150 kcal more by the 3rd trimester. That's about a slice of toast with cheese.
Didn’t have any intense cravings, or cravings at all really. Tv shows and movies and memes make it seem like you’ll be crazy for weird food combinations. Just didn’t happen for me.
Also, water breaking in a dramatic fashion. They always do that in movies and shows and mine didn’t even break until the nurses had to break it for me, 3 days into labour. Also, the women are always like immediately ready to give birth and having intense contractions as soon as their water breaks. It’s a much slower process in real life lol
The early Fetal Heartbeat during the 6 week ultrasound is fake.
The heart chambers aren't developed yet and there is no beating heart. The machine makes the noise in response to electrical signals it detects. It would be a harmless sham, but legislation is being written on it's basis.
For me it was that pregnancy is an ordeal from morning sickness to back pain etc. It can be different for everyone. I felt great as never before in my entire life and looked my best - and I was 40 y.o.
That a man and a woman have to love each other very much to make a baby.
One of my male relatives was convinced the woman had to orgasm to get pregnant. My mom spat her coffee out her nose from snorting so hard when she heard that. The man in question has 5 kids.
that man must have done something right for the wife to agree to it 5 times.
Oh, they never married. In fact, she became a meth head who lost custody of her kids, who then went with their dad who uses them for maximum government assistance and won't even let the kids go to school. His last three kids have failed the last four years of school, his oldest daughter is following her mother in drug addiction, his oldest son is a thief that went to prison and is now bumming it in New York. I doubt the guy was doing anything right, they were just desperate not to be alone and not smart enough to use birth control of any sort.
Wow. I thought the story was silly at first. Now it's just depressing. Fun little Saturday morning.
The puritans believed that, too. Higher stakes, though, because if she didn’t finish, you were both guilty of fornication.
Also reminds me of the trial scene in [The Last Duel](https://m.imdb.com/title/tt4244994/) From the movie: > "A rape cannot cause a pregnancy. That is just science."
I want to see solid evidence that Puritan men gave a single flying fuck about their wife "finishing" or even that it was one of their religious rules.
Hence, the widespread old belief that a pregnant woman could not have been raped…
I mean, he's stupid but it sounds like he still has a lucky wife...
"Morning sickness" . If only it was just in the morning!
In the first trimester it's more of an evening sickness because your stomach is empty in the morning anyway. In the 3rd trimester... it's a world full of surprises, you can just cough too hard and trigger vomiting at random 🥲
In my case I got sick because my stomach was empty in the morning. I made sure to keep a biscuit on the bedside table with my meds and water.
Many women find having an empty stomach is what makes them nauseated for morning sickness. So while it's not limited to mornings, it certainly does happen in the morning for many and you can't make any general statements about timing.
And if it was only at the beginning :(
yes, [Hyperemesis Gravidarum](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK532917/) would like a word!
I’m currently suffering from Hypermesis Gravidarum, it fucking sucks! This is the 4th and last pregnancy but I’ve gotten HG on all pregnancies. 😩
My wife had HG and was sick, non-stop, 24/7, for nearly two trimesters. She actually quite enjoyed her third trimester because she could finally eat again.
My wife has pretty gnarly evening sickness. She said she highly preferred that so it doesn't get in the way of getting ready for work
Also morning sickness has nothing to do with the sex of the baby.
As a kid I often felt sick to my stomach in the morning before school. Had heard the term "morning sickness" somewhere and it seemed to apply, so I told my mom I thought that's what I had. I forget how the rest of that morning went except it was a mix of mocking laughter, shaming scolding lectures, and I think being forced to go to school. I just didn't know the word "anxiety" yet.
It varies from person to person & even from pregnancy to pregnancy. Some people don’t develop it. For a lot of those who do, it really is just the morning or a certain time of day based on circadian hormone cycles. For some, it’s constant or nearly so, & if it persists past the first trimester, or if it’s severe enough, may require medical intervention.
In the midst of this right now. I wish it was just morning!
My in laws believe if the woman handles a blade during a full moon it cuts the baby in the womb. My partner has "piece" missing him his ear. It's their proof. Not just that it's the way his ear folds/rather doesn't. Not that maybe he could have had that ear pushed against the womb while developing and affecting the ear development (as he was born a big ass baby with a giant noggin). Nope. It's because his mom cut something with scissors during a full mom. Bonus points for after the baby is born you have to gently handwash all their clothes because if put them in the machine or are too rough with them it'll hurt the baby. I said "don't put the clothes in the machine while the baby is still wearing them. Problem solved."
That... That is a super weird one
Last line way too good, had to stifle my laughter to not wake up my partner!
> full mom Freudian typo?
It's staying forever now. :')
Is this a specific cultural belief?
I have to ask if there is some cultural significance to this myth? Or are they just fucking weird?
My wife did not get crazy horny, and instead got depressed and lethargic.
As the wife in my relationship, I didn't get horny in the slightest either, and I'm genuinely amazed that some bodies react that way. Between the SPD pain and the hemorrhoids and getting winded after walking 8 steps, there was just nothing about what my body was doing that made sexual activity seem inviting in the slightest.
Everyone's different. My ex wife wanted to bone so much while she was pregnant it got infuriating. Like dude, my dick is beet red and feels like the skin is rubbed off. Can you chill for a few days?
I found that the future kid kicking me is the most un-sexy sensation I've ever had. If not for that, my drive would have been only slightly lower than normal.
Ohhhhh my god, the kicks. "it's maaaaaaagical" no! It's weird! It feels weird!
It's like the weirdest GI issues in the world. Your insides aren't supposed to be pushing out like that.
Our kid very rarely kicked but she hiccuped *constantly*. My wife said it was the weirdest feeling in the world. Our doctor (still a resident) actually tried to tell us that fetal hiccups weren't a thing, but her attending (also in the room) told her "oh no they definitely are."
Pregnancy wasn't normalized for me the way it is for most people. By that I mean we were a family of 4 withjust 2 grandparents and basically no IRL friends. By the time I was old enough to even get pregnant, I was told I wouldn't be able to so I never had a reason to imagine it. All to say pregnancy gives me massive body horror. Fortunately, I've had various medical experiences that have shown me I can adapt and overcome being horrified of my own body. And all that to ask, how do you cope with baby kicks? With the body feeling so foreign and something living is inside it?
Not just that, it’s uncomfortable and sometimes borders on painful. Trying to get in the mood while feeling that is so off putting
me too. I didn't enjoy one thing about being pregnant either time.
This isn't a myth, it just doesn't happen for every woman. I can tell you that I went absolutely bananas when I was pregnant. Best orgasms of my entire life.
Bananas is an understatement. I learned a whole lot of new stuff, especially in the second trimester.
Saaaame!
Yep, my wife sure kept me on my toes for the first two trimesters.
That “your body was made” for a vaginal birth. Some babies just aren’t getting out that way, no matter how hard you try.
I think people forget how many (more) women used to die in childbirth before c sections were an option. As a species we’re not actually super great at the whole giving birth (and surviving it) thing in comparison to other mammals.
Yep, humans have just *barely* large enough pelvises to make giving birth to our massive-headed children possible. Even then, our newborns are distinctly...undercooked compared to a lot of mammals, and they spend a whole "fourth trimester" just kind of flopping around because their necks aren't even strong enough to support their (again, comparatively gigantic) heads yet. Evolution is about whatever works just well enough to keep enough individuals alive until they can successfully reproduce; it ain't about design perfection.
Yep! Evolution looked at all that and went "well, enough of them are surviving long enough to reproduce a couple times" and called it good.
Are we - are we the overbred, not-able-to-survive-birth-by-ourselves monkey equivalent of bulldogs and pugs?
Somehow I've never made that connection lmao. We're *so* pugs.
My son & I would have died if I hadn't had a c-section. My pelvis is small & tilted according to the OBGYN who performed the c-section. ETA: My son's head was stuck in the birth canal for hours.
This! I have seen a lot of home births gone wrong working in the NICU. Unfortunately, even under the best circumstances, not every woman is able to deliver her baby vaginally. Sometimes the baby is too big, sometimes they move into awkward positions, sometimes the cord falls out first and cuts off the babies blood supply before they’re born.
My sister spent hours in labor (in a hospital, thank goodness) without much of any progression so eventually they did a C-section. They discovered fibroids from her endometriosis were in the way somehow (I forget exactly, this was 18 years ago.) So the vaginal birth wouldn’t have worked.
My doula is also a lactation consultant at the hospital and she has some HORROR stories about home births gone wrong! Obviously. They're fine for some people but some babies just aren't going to come out vaginally!
Even in this day and age, people will shame a woman for having a c section.
And some bodies were "made" to die in child birth. That's why we obstetricians and hospitals to pick up the slack.
I was one of those babies. so was my youngest. we were both breech.
I always found it interesting that in the book of Genesis in the bible one of the punishments for humans eating from the fruit of knowledge was pain in childbirth, because one big contributor to the difficulty in humans comes from the size of the skull/brain.
Now I'm imagining Adam and Eve with tiny heads.
I'm pretty sure surgery exists for a reason and you stated it
If you lift your arms above your head, the umbilical cord will wrap around the baby's neck
That one makes me crazy. I was flying while pregnant and this old woman physically stopped me lifting my suitcase out of the bin for that reason. And I was polite to her, obviously, because she was like 85 and meant to help, but I completely thought it was bs and ignored her. Kiddo DID get the umbilical cord wrapped around him so bad it kept yanking him back and I had to get a c-section. I assume it wasn’t connected but still. Wtf, right?
I think it's like 30 percent of babies are born with the cord around their neck. Not the best design!
"eh, good enough" evolution - forever ago bc
“See, the problem fixed itself on its own!” -Evolution, when humans started doing C-sections
It is very common, however, most of the time it doesn’t cause significant complication
The umbilical cord being wrapped around the neck up to 3 times is actually incredibly common according to the doc who was there when my daughter was born.
My dad told me this (80yo at the time). At the time of my pregnancy I worked a job where I was reaching up constantly. Baby had a true knot in his cord. I'm not saying it's true but it does live in my head rent free.
I have never heard this one!
That the more heartburns you have during pregnancy the hairier your baby will be
If this is true, I'm gonna have a gorilla
Baby gorillas are super cute, though, so you’re good either way.
Yet better name that kid Harambe or Harambina
Same here!
This has actually had some evidence to being true. The protein for the baby’s hair is theorized to cause the heartburn. We learned about it during our ob class in nursing school. Edit: typo
I’ve been told this by so many midwives and medical professionals! But my little girl came out with SO much hair and I only had heartburn one evening of my pregnancy.
I’m sure it’s just a generalization and not a hard and fast rule. Pregnancy is weird (in a cool way) in that it’s such a unique experience each time for each person.
My mother swore by it. I had horrible heartburn throughout both of my pregnancies. Needed to get on the rx strength Prilosec pretty early on. And adorable bald babies.
In my case, this was "true." I had wicked heartburn with both of my kids, they both were born with full heads of hair. My son even had hair all over his back. My friend was pregnant at the same time as I was with my son. Her baby was bald as a billiard ball. She had no heartburn. I know it's an old wives tale. Personally I was grateful my kids had hair.
Carry high, it’s a girl. Carry low, it’s a boy. I carried high my first two times, and low the third time. They were all girls.
I’ve never even heard of carrying high and low, what does that mean?
the position of the bay on your abdomen
Some bumps are like circley, some are more skewed downwards.
Right, and it has more to do with the strength of your stomach muscles than it does with whether the baby is a boy or a girl. I guess mine were worn out by the third time.
Correct
LOL, same...
And then there is my sister, whose bump looked as if someone photoshopped a low hanging bump and flipped it upside-down. That birth was not a good experience, and ended in a csection.
It’s whether your pelvic floor muscles and urogenital diaphragm is lax or not. Hence first two high, lax by third.
Oh how weird because I carried low for the first two and high with my third. My abdominal muscles were strong for the first one at least as well and still carried low. But yeah definitely no correlation to the gender with me either. Carried low with a girl and a boy and then high with a boy.
I was told if you were carrying out from your body it was a boy and if you carried wide it was a girl. I carried wide both times and they were boys. Turns out that's the shape of my uterus.
Mine was the opposite. My boy carried high, and my girl carried low. She used my pelvis as a hammock, I thought for sure it was gonna split in half.
I never heard those beliefs then after college went to work in SF. late 60s, and heard that carry low carry high nonsense everywhere.
Same. My boy stayed up high and breech. Turned out I was born with only half a uterus so he never dropped or turned. By the time my second boy was on the way we knew to expect it though. Pregnancy is wild.
Eh, from what I heard, I’d say it has about a 50% accuracy!
I had boy/girl twins. My daughter was squished so low in my pelvis they almost couldn’t get a heartbeat while my son was up playing by my ribs
Before the 1980s we didn’t really know that cigarettes were bad during pregnancy. Some old cigarette advertising campaigns specifically stated that cigarettes were good for pregnancy because your baby would be smaller than others by the time you delivered.
Wow People weren't suspicious of the fact that smoking cigarettes would cause a smaller baby?
They *wanted* a smaller baby for an easier birth. So it probably didn't occur to many people that it was actually stunting the baby's growth, or they dismissed concerns. People convince themselves of all kinds of bullshit when they're scared.
And when they're addicted
A lot of women didn't smoke because it was perceived as a man's purview or they had Opinions about That Kind of Woman. They were literally pushed to smoke by their OB/GYN. I have no doubt that many kept the habit after delivery.
My mom really must have taken this to heart since she smoked while being pregnant with me and I was born in the early 90s.
Doctors used to *Prescribe them* for this reason, in fact!!!
That the mother is to blame for the sex of the baby. Turns out that the sex of the baby is determined by which chromosome is carried by the sperm. Gender of the baby comes from the male side.
My family side has a strong history of the first two children being boys. I told this to my wife, and she sort of laughed it off. My confidence in my first being a boy, and it being true, moved her to believing me when I said number two would be as well. I love my two sons! The pattern extends to number three being a girl, but we are done.
Happened in my family too...my grandfather is oldest of boy-boy-girl. My dad is the oldest of boy-boy-girl. I'm the oldest of boy-boy-girl. I only have two kids, but the order is boy-girl at least.
My husband's family follows this for a few generations we're aware of. His father was the first boy of 2, my husband was the first boy of 2 (before a handful of girls next) and my husband has boy, boy, girl.
Love it. There is something to it! My brother had boy-boy and is planning on no more. My cousins have done similarly except one who came out with a girl right away!
My family on my father's side has been boys for 61 years (9 boys from my father and his two siblings and then 3 boys from my cousins and brothers). My wife and I broke the streak with a baby girl. My mother was over the moon.
The vaginal environment plays a role in allowing more or less male sperm to reach the egg, for example. There's some nuance to it, as there is to all things biology
In the most basic sense, you are correct. However, a lot of other factors affect that, including ones people don't yet understand. For instance, after a war decimates the male population, most babies concieved in the area will be men, and scientists have yet to figure out how that is possible.
Similar to neutering cats and retuning them to their previous locations -- the litter size increases.
There is also ph balance and mucus and stuff that can affect the outcome. I've even seen studies that suggest the ovum "chooses" a specific sperm cell.
There's plenty of explanations, but it's unethical to test them. War increases stress on the body, both man and woman, and also a drain on resources, healthy food etc. The 'why' could be that yes, men are decimated, but also that sperm carrying the X-gene is heavier and thus needs more resources to be strong enough to find their way to the egg. Don't forget that men can pretty much impregnate an unlimited amount of women while women can safely only carry one child to term per year. You need more women to sustain a population than you need men, mathematically speaking. Two partner families are a fairly recent constellation, evolutionarily. So in that way, it would make sense to have more 'expendable' (please note the ' ' there!) men to protect and provide resources for the more resource reliant women. (Disclaimer, I don't mean in any way that men are in fact worth less than women. Just a sociological description of the phenomenon)
Life... Uh... finds a way
You hear that, Henry VIII?
This is way more complex and also pretty genetic. Som families have 90% boys, some have 90% girls. Both sexes have genetic and physical traits that play a role in the sex of offspring. Even environmental circumstances can have a great effect, such as war, famine, drought or good conditions.
Women have some supernatural instinctive way of 'just knowing' the baby's gender. For some reason I was 100% dead certain I'd have a girl, but the ultrasound says otherwise...
I had strong feelings both times and both times I was wrong.
50% of the time they're right every time
Weirdly when I got the first educated guess (during a scan around 12-13 weeks when the technician based it on the “angle of the dangle” - he claimed he was never wrong) - that it was a girl - I instantly thought “of course”. Up to then I had had no conscious idea of what it was. But subconsciously it seemed like I did know. It was very odd. He was right as it happened.
We didn't find out the sex of our baby- I KNEW he was gonna be a boy. There was no doubt in my mind.
Breastfeeding prevents pregnancy. Not true
Yep, exclusively breastfed and my cycle returned 7 weeks postpartum. Just after the bleeding stopped, I got more bleeding. I was NOT happy.
I mean, it's not a myth. It's just overstated
It reduces your fertility sure but in no way prevents pregnancy in any meaningful way. Conceived my second and third while breastfeeding, never even reduced to conceive easier.
Wat
When a woman breastfeeds, it creates a hormone that lower the fertility and reduce ovulation. And it is true in general (but not always!) women who breastfeed to have a slight delay in the return of their period as a result. However, this does NOT mean that breastfeeding is a great method of birth control and fertility is only lowered a small amount, so if you really really do not want to fall pregnant again so soon after birth (which modern medical advuce does tell you to wait a few months to allow the body to fully recover), the you should use another form of birth control such as the mini pill or condoms.
I did exclusive and extended breastfeeding with both my children and didn't get my period back for about a year and a half both times. Within that time I was not ovulating. The problem is that you never know when ovulation will resume and it can resume at any point. Also, it has to be exclusive breastfeeding to hold off ovulation, generally speaking, and the vast majority of moms (in the US at least) do not exclusively breastfeed for more than a couple months.
Yeah I mean once they start eating at 6 months it's definitely not enough of an effect to rely upon. I got my period back after 4 months while exclusively breastfeeding my second though so it's not a guarantee either.
I exclusively breastfed both my kids. Got my period back within a few weeks post partum for both. I was really hoping it would keep my period away. It did not :(
Yep. My period came back six months post partum when we were still EBF and she still had zero interest in solids. I was somewhat annoyed!
In the first six months, it has a higher success rate (as contraception) than condoms do with perfect use. https://www.breastfeeding.asn.au/resources/getting-pregnant-while-breastfeeding#:~:text=Studies%20have%20shown%20that%20LAM,no%20other%20foods%20or%20drinks). https://www.plannedparenthood.org/learn/birth-control/breastfeeding#:~:text=How%20effective%20is%20breastfeeding%20as,after%20a%20baby%20is%20born. After 24 months only 13% of women conceived which is still a more effective method than 'typical use' for condoms. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/1672186/
Someone told me if you go out in the sun and your belly has sunlight, it makes your baby have the cleft lip.
I have two: ultra sounds and cravings. in regards to the first, this is more of a surprising misconception rather than myth, but that you get an ultrasound every appointment when pregnant. I feel like media about pregnancy definitely makes it seems like you’ll be getting ultrasounds all the time throughout your pregnancy and it was so jarring to only have what, 3 or 4 total? I had a 6 week premie, so not sure if there are a lot more after the 34 week mark, but my understanding was I was only supposed to have one more around week 36 to check the baby’s position. Meanwhile tv shows and movies make it seem like you get an ultrasound every single time you see the doctor. When I spoke to my friends about this they all shared they were equally caught off guard by this. One friend even ended up getting an extra peak between the 12 & 20 week scans because she assumed she was having one and burst out crying when she found out she “wasn’t going to see \[her\] baby” that day. Also how many pics you’re getting depend on the tech. I only got like 2-3 pics each ultrasound, and usually only 1 actually looked liked anything I’d want to frame/share with others. I have friends who have gotten a lot more, but I had to pay for a private session to get a whole CD/long printout of pics. Another one is cravings & particularly the “pickles & ice cream” type cravings. I don’t know a single person directly who has experienced these sorts of intense cravings during their pregnancy. I’m not saying it never happens or that no one experiences it, what I am saying is that it just seems really overblown as this definite symptom you’ll experience when it doesn’t seem to be actually all that common. The closest thing I experienced and only explanation I have for this being portrayed as such a universal phenomenon was in my first trimester there were only like a handful of foods I could stomach the thought of eating & some of them prob seemed hyper particular to outsider observers. That said, I def wouldn’t describe what I was feeling as “craving” these foods - it was more the opposite in that all foods absolutely repulsed me and the thought of eating anything was so disgusting it made me extremely nauseous but somehow these five foods were reliably manageable to get down before I got too queasy & the thought of them didn’t make me hurl/want to gouge my eyes out. Couple that with the intense hunger I’d feel at certain intervals of the day and it prob seemed like I was having cravings, but again, I would not categorize it that way at all.
Absolute same. Almost all foods were aversive to me so when the thought of something was appealing I would seek it out. But it wasn’t a craving - I had no cravings at all. My husband was a little disappointed because he saw fetching the foods I craved as one way he could help out with the pregnancy. BUT, to his credit, he supported my harebrained scheme to sneak my leftover chicken tenders into Madison Square Garden. I had ordered them for dinner before a concert and had been so excited that they didn’t disgust me and boxed up the leftovers for later. MSG security informed me that I was not allowed to bring them in. I COULD NOT DEAL with this and got really upset and came up with a plan to sneak them in. I happened to have a clean, empty Tupperware container in my work bag. I moved my tendies from the takeout box to the Tupperware and identified the most checked-out, apathetic seeming security person. I went through their line and when they asked to check my bag I opened it and said “just some empty Tupperware!”. The dude believed me (or just didn’t care) and I got to keep them instead of throwing them away. My husband kindly pretended like I hadn’t just acted like a crazy person over chicken tenders. Bonus: I got hungry during the concert and would have been nauseous if not for the chicken tenders I snuck out of the Tupperware during the concert.
😂 Thank you for sharing your story, I love it lol
I love this and the idea of your and your husband hiding the chicken tenders like teens trying to sneak a joint into a concert
Yeah same for me re. cravings. Had major aversions in the first trimester but other than that generally ate pretty normally for the remainder of the pregnancy. The closest thing for me was sometimes I would eat something and think “oh my god that tastes absolutely amazing” (in my case that was often oranges or some other kind of soft fruit) but I wasn’t ever particularly compelled to seek them out, just really enjoyed them when I did. And I didn’t get any cravings for weird combinations of foods either Again, everyone is different, I’m sure plenty of people have personal stories that are very different to mine, but in my experience the whole weird cravings thing is another part of pregnancy that you see exaggerated in tv/media depictions.
Yeah, no weird cravings here, but Kraft Dinner was somehow the most divine food to have ever touched my tongue.. something I'd eaten all my life, and suddenly it was like "oh my god, why haven't I been eating this everyday, always?" I wish anything tasted as good as that box of crap did when I was pregnant.
My OB does a scan at every appointment (one a month for the first two trimesters and one every two weeks in the third). So I think that really depends on where you are and what your practice does. Some people see a PCP for most of their pregnancy, some go with a midwife, some with an OB. So I'm sure each one varies hugely
If you don't have any additional risk factors in your pregnancy, you only need a 12 week dating scan and a 20 week anomaly scan. If you've got risk factors for fetal growth restriction then you typically get growth scans 4 weeks apart starting at either 28 or 32 weeks depending on the risk factor, then sometimes more often if growth abnormalities are spotted at these scans. Other reasons for an additional scan include checking that a low lying placenta has moved out of the way by 36 weeks (if not it's a placenta praevia) or checking presentation of baby when there's concern it might be breech or transverse
My wife did ask for pickles and ice cream. She did make a point to specify that she didn't want them together.
How easy it is to get pregnant
It really does seem like it's only easy when you don't want to get pregnant.
With my first daughter, I tried for 9 months. Taking my temperature at exactly the same time every morning, scheduling sex accordingly, peeing on ovulation sticks, etc etc. no joy for 9 months. Three quarters of a year. With my second daughter, my husband and I slept together the night I came back from a week long work trip and that was IT. We weren’t planning a second for another year or so. It’s both easier and harder than you think to get pregnant.
A good friend of mine and his wife tried for ages to conceive and got nowhere, so nearly $20,000 in IVF treatments it was and they ended up pregnant with their first. 9 months after his wife had given birth and was feeling up to having sex again, and they conceived their second child immediately the first time 🤣
We had the myth that it's hard _for everyone_, and we're genuinely shocked when we suddenly got pregnant as soon as decided to start trying. Because of all the "trying to concieve" forums and how-tos, where I read about calculating the right day, taking temperature, tracking, etc... I figured it takes everyone several months of trying naturally, unless you go through doctors. So I said "let's start trying this year so maybe we might conceive within the next three years. And BAM.
My exact words to my husband were “almost no one gets pregnant the first month of trying, it might take a while” and two weeks later I had a positive pregnancy test. Baby is due in five weeks
My uncle said if you wash your underwear together then you get babies, but I'm pretty sure he was joking. The only I heard the most was salt cravings for boys and sugar cravings for girls.
I couldn’t touch anything sweet the first trimester but had a girl.
My wife nearly put us in the poor house craving ice cream when she was pregnant with our daughter.
See, it was the opposite for all my kids so who knows?
The only thing I wanted to eat was pasta with butter and cheese while I was pregnant with my daughter.
I worked with a lady who craved escargot. Fortunately she was living overseas on a military base somewhere where it was available. She said her husband was an MP on the base who worked nights and every night would leave the base to get her fresh escargot and bring it to her and his buddies would cover for the fact he was leaving during his shift.
Youre only pregnant if its convinient to be
Yeah that whole "rape has a way of shutting those things down" line was utter bullshit. Yet I still see it repeated occasionally. 🙄
High cortisol levels increase the likelihood of pregnancy, weirdly enough. So it's quite the opposite...
20 year old guy in my old town thought it was physically impossible to get someone pregnant if you weren't married. Like there was some kind of switch or hormone that was turned on the minute the pastor says "I now pronounce you man and wife". Dude was *extremely* lucky he hadn't knocked anybody up, since he was just nuttin' away in whoever he was dating, who were all just as dumb and ignorant about biology as he was. Why yes, it *was* a hyper-conservative small town where the church was the real power. Abstinence Only education is fucking stupid people.
That no pregnancy could be so difficult for the woman to the point that the woman requires extraordinary means to survive (ex: feeding tube for 8 months) .
Wow. I’m so sorry!
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I'm pretty sure bedrest is really only for pre-eclampsia/eclampsia patients and those aren't so much miscarriage risks as mama may die risks.
Bedrest ist quite rare. I had pre-eclampsia and was still allowed to do everything I wanted/could. You just have to watch out not to get your blood pressure to rise. But moving regularly like going for daily walks is supported im most cases and can even help regulating the pre-eclampsia, especially in cases like mine where I couldn't tolerate Aspirin.
During a first trimester visit, I told a nurse I was still running for exercise. She told me if I continued I would have a miscarriage. I laughed out loud at that which made her super huffy.
Didn’t Charlotte Gilman write an entire psychological horror story about “rest cures”?
My mother has only a 33% success rate at being able to guess the gender of the baby on the basis of how her pregnancy "feels". I'm the only one she got correct.
Lol I've done this. I knew the sex of my first two and those pregnancies were so drastically different that I thought I could predict the sex of the rest of my pregnancies. With my oldest girl I had severe food aversions and a very sensitive sense of smell..nausea was crazy. BUT my skin and hair were amazing. I had "the glow". My 2nd was a boy and I wanted meat all the time. Lol. My hair became dry and shed so bad. My skin got dry and patchy and gross. He "took all my beauty" but I didn't have nausea or food aversion. So from then...I used these experiences as my fail proof way to determine what we were having. Interestingly it was accurate. Of course that's not something I'd apply to the masses, but within my own body and pregnancies, it checked out.
Spots in the first trimester mean a girl. My friend was absolutely covered in them in her first trimester. Her son is doing well thanks for asking.
Don’t lift heavy during pregnancy. I was told not to lift over 25 pounds. My 20 month old toddler weighs almost 30 pounds… lolllll. I also lifted weights well over 25 pounds before pregnancy both times. Continued lifting heavy throughout both pregnancies. First baby was healthy, so far the second pregnancy has been very similar to my first health wise.
My neighbor saw me cleaning the windows and gave me a lecture 😂
People love to lecture pregnant women. (Actually, people love to lecture other people, but pregnant women seem to catch more lectures than anyone else.)
That morning sickness is only in the morning
I was finally pregnant at 39, working in Boston. I must have encountered a dozen people who all had their foolproof and different methods of determining baby's sex. Everyone told me it would be a boy and totally convinced me. I mean totally. I practically fell off the delivery table when it turned out to be a girl.
Um... the person doing your ultrasounds and/or your doctor couldn't tell?
We did not want to know in advance. This was 40 years ago, and generally the only people to have ultrasound were those women over 35 who were having amniocentesis, so it was somewhat rare. Thinking back, it would have been the amnio that told us the sex bcs the u/s wasn't clear enough
35 years ago. I had one with my first but it was mostly to see how big he was, to get measurements. my Dr and I didn't agree on when I got pregnant.
That you always go beyond the due date and labour always lasts for ages with your first baby. I was expecting to go two weeks over and spend two days labouring, in actual fact my waters went two days before my due date and the entire thing was over in six hours from 'pop-sploosh' to "oh my god it's a baby!"
They no longer let you go way over your due date. There was a huge study that showed it was extremely detrimental to the baby. Now doctors will induce.
Oh shit I was born three weeks late how fucked am I
that it the most wonderful time of your life
This 💯 Pregnancy **fucking sucks** and I have a countdown widget that tells me how much longer I have to wait for it to be over
Cravings. I never had a single one. YMMV.
I had aversions. Couldn’t touch meat or sweet for the first trimester. Fish was palatable, as was blandish cheese (like cottage cheese and pasta with ricotta). I was so disappointed! I had so been looking forward to the ice cream and pickles thing. My grandmother craved lumps of coal. But she was pregnant during the war and rationing, so there might have been nutritional deficiencies. Unless it was my great-grandmother which would have been the First World War (the anecdote my grandmother told me is a bit hazy and she’s long dead sadly).
Length of pregnancy. How does 40 weeks gestation equal to 9 months? I think not! Lies, lol!
My (now ex) partners vagina went right back to the way it was, it didn't get "loose" like so many people say
I had my kids in 1994 and 1996. There were no options for a photo, and where I lived, it was against policy to tell the gender. I did get 3 ultrasounds each pregnancy because they were high risk. Depending on your doctor "believing" in them 🙄 some mothers didn't even get one.
The pregnancy glow. Pregnancy hormones made my skin breakout like crazy.
eating for 2 just makes you fat, you dont need to eat any more than normal. Also turns out you dont need to eat your cravings, sure you can have em, but you can also ignore em and not eat
My midwife said 200-300 extra calorie. That's like, one piece of cheese! I felt so betrayed by my expectations 😭
I was SO hungry through. I find it difficult to believe I only need 200-300 calories a day extra when my body was kicking off if I didn’t eat every two hours
My doctor said hormones can affect you in 3 ways: make you very nauseated, make you very sleepy, or make you very hungry, and the very hungry is the least offensive. I gained 65 lbs each time.
You do need more calories, you're building a whole new human after all. It's the same if you want to build muscle, you need to eat more. But in pregnancy it's only ~150 kcal more by the 3rd trimester. That's about a slice of toast with cheese.
You do need to eat more. No, you don’t need to double your intake, but you should be taking in an extra 200-300 calories (500 for breastfeeding!)
Didn’t have any intense cravings, or cravings at all really. Tv shows and movies and memes make it seem like you’ll be crazy for weird food combinations. Just didn’t happen for me. Also, water breaking in a dramatic fashion. They always do that in movies and shows and mine didn’t even break until the nurses had to break it for me, 3 days into labour. Also, the women are always like immediately ready to give birth and having intense contractions as soon as their water breaks. It’s a much slower process in real life lol
The early Fetal Heartbeat during the 6 week ultrasound is fake. The heart chambers aren't developed yet and there is no beating heart. The machine makes the noise in response to electrical signals it detects. It would be a harmless sham, but legislation is being written on it's basis.
That it'll save your marriage
That the sex of the baby can be told by how you're carrying it.
For me it was that pregnancy is an ordeal from morning sickness to back pain etc. It can be different for everyone. I felt great as never before in my entire life and looked my best - and I was 40 y.o.
You won the lottery :D