Jonathan Schaffir - What to Believe When Youre Expecting: A New Look at Old Wives Tales in Pregnancy

What to Believe When Youre Expecting

ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD

Lanham Boulder New York London

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Schaffir, Jonathan, 1965 author.

Title: What to believe when youre expecting : a new look at old wives tales in pregnancy / Jonathan Schaffir.

Description: Lanham : Rowman & Littlefield, [2017] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2017007990 (print) | LCCN 2017012112 (ebook) | ISBN 9781538102084 (electronic) | ISBN 9781538102077 (cloth : alk. paper)

Subjects: LCSH: PregnancyPopular works.

Classification: LCC RG551 (ebook) | LCC RG551 .S33 2017 (print) | DDC 618.2dc23

TM The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Printed in the United States of America

For Marcy, who believes in all the right things; and for Alison and Noah, who are the best proof of what makes a pregnancy turn out well.

As an obstetrician, I am used to all sorts of strange questions from my patients. When a woman has something that is nearly the size of a watermelon sitting squarely on top of her bladder and pelvic organs, no topics are off-limits. My day is peppered with all sorts of remarks about digestion, urination, back pain, swelling, and sex. In most cases, I have reasonable answers to these questions. After all, years of training and experience have provided me with insight into the problems that can crop up during pregnancy and the remedies that might be helpful. Even if I am not sure about the issue at hand, I know which textbook or journal to look in to find the answer.

Once in a while, I hear questions that are a bit more difficult to answer. These are the questions about issues that dont appear in medical textbooks. For example, a woman might ask me whether having sex or eating Chinese food will make her labor start sooner. Or whether drinking a beer will help her milk come in after delivery. A question I hear almost daily is whether you can tell if the baby will be a girl from how fast its heartbeat is. It would be easy to brush off these questions as silly or ill-informed. Why would spicy food start labor? Theres no medical reason for that.

But it is not so easy to brush off these questions. For one thing, they keep popping up. They are not asked by just one person who might have gotten some strange notion in her head. They are voiced by dozens of women in my practice. When you hear the same suggestion over and over, you begin to think that maybe all those people suggesting it know something that you dont. Also, these questions are not proposed by poorly educated or eccentric women. They are expressed by women from all walks of life and all different cultures. When I ask them where they heard these notions, they often point to a trusted friend or an overbearing mother-in-law. No one ever tells me that they read about these issues in a patient handout or informational booklet.

Sometimes women speak of these recommendations earnestly. A woman frustrated by the discomfort of full-term pregnancy may be determined to find any reasonable way to get labor started a little sooner. Some of the information seems to be shared just for fun. Does anyone really think she can tell the babys gender by swinging her wedding ring over her pregnant belly? Probably not, but it is an amusing diversion at a baby shower. Most of these suggestions are made in the same vein as the more serious questions about diet or vitamins or birthing classes. They originate from a sincere desire to find out what the baby will be like, how to care for it, and how to make the pregnancy easier.

Yet the types of recommendations and the individual pieces of advice are remarkably consistent. The idea that this information is being widely circulated without the aid of any official written directive is what earns them the term obstetrical folklore. Like other pieces of folklore, they are communicated orally throughout a community, often over the course of generations. Since it is mostly women who talk about them, they are sometimes referred to as old wives tales, even though the sources are not necessarily old, and not necessarily married.

Now that everyone with a tablet or a smartphone can surf the Internet from anywhere in the world, such advice is more available and widespread than ever. Now a woman can find pages and pages of information about the most obscure pregnancy issues at the touch of a button. Providing this information has become easier, too. Old wives can post their opinions, experiences, and little-known facts on their personal webpages and blogs. Many websites have sprung up that offer advice on pregnancy, ranging from the sensible to the quite absurd. A simple Internet search will yield dozens of sites where women can purportedly determine the sex of their baby by entering the month of conception, or find a list of herbal remedies that will cure breast engorgement. There are also plenty of medically sound and well-researched sites that offer excellent advice to pregnant women about conception, pregnancy, and postpartum care. Yet even some reliable sources will share advice from old wives, perhaps to entertain or to grab attention.

Although having access to this advice may be a product of the computer age, women may not realize that this wisdom is actually a relic of the Stone Age. Recommendations about getting pregnant and taking care of pregnancy have been around throughout recorded history, and probably as far back to when women could first use language to communicate about their birth experiences. What is surprising is how many of these tales exist on the Internet in almost the same form as they did in the writings of Hippocrates or in biblical times. There are few other types of advice that are passed on in all seriousness by seemingly authoritative web authors. For example, it would take a good deal of database searching to find a pediatric website where a parent recommends an ancient Greek remedy for an ear infection. But numerous hits will share a recipe for conceiving a male fetus that was formulated before the Christian era.

Most of these remedies are easily shrugged off as unscientific and unreasonable. A reasonably educated woman will probably not be convinced that attending a funeral might harm her baby. So why are all of these recommendations still being repeated in this age of evidence-based medical care? Is it purely for entertainment? What factors make pregnancy in particular such a (pardon the expression) fertile field for this advice to take hold? This book will sort through the many examples of such old wives tales, from the ones that explain how to get pregnant quickly to the ones that help women recover from childbirth. It will try to explain why some remain popular and why they still get mentioned in doctors offices routinely.