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Expecting Better: Why the Conventional Pregnancy Wisdom Is Wrong–and What You Really Need to Know (The ParentData Series)
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Original price was: $18.00.$11.39Current price is: $11.39.
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“Emily Oster is the non-judgmental girlfriend holding our hand and guiding us through pregnancy and motherhood. She has done the work to get us the hard facts in a soft, understandable way.” —Amy Schumer
What to Expect When You’re Expecting meets Freakonomics: an award-winning economist and author of Cribsheet, The Family Firm, and The Unexpected disproves standard recommendations about pregnancy to empower women while they’re expecting.
Pregnancy—unquestionably one of the most profound, meaningful experiences of adulthood—can reduce otherwise intelligent women to, well, babies. Pregnant women are told to avoid cold cuts, sushi, alcohol, and coffee without ever being told why these are forbidden. Rules for prenatal testing are similarly unexplained. Moms-to-be desperately want a resource that empowers them to make their own right choices.
When award-winning economist Emily Oster was a mom-to-be herself, she evaluated the data behind the accepted rules of pregnancy, and discovered that most are often misguided and some are just flat-out wrong. Debunking myths and explaining everything from the real effects of caffeine to the surprising dangers of gardening, Expecting Better is the book for every pregnant woman who wants to enjoy a healthy and relaxed pregnancy—and the occasional glass of wine.
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Categories: Business & Money
Product name:
Expecting Better: Why the Conventional Pregnancy Wisdom Is Wrong–and What You Really Need to Know (The ParentData Series)
Price:
Original price was: $18.00.$11.39Current price is: $11.39.
Anestis –
Puts things into perspective and helps with ease your mind into your first pregnancy. A good data driven approach that I really appreciated !
Elisa –
This approachable, entertaining, well-researched book provides clear and useful summaries of medical studies on a wide range of important pregnancy-related topics: the pros and cons of various pre-natal tests, epidurals, induction, doulas, and home birth; foods that are best to be avoided, and those that are less dangerous than conventional wisdom might have us presume. It is an excellent resource– it’s like a friendly encyclopedia of pregnancy- and childbirth- related medical research!
The author emphasizes the fact that medical recommendations come from studies, not from thin air– and that with a little guidance (which Oster provides), women and their partners can understand those studies, and how to interpret the results in the context of their own lives. Oster shares her own choices (with much self-deprecating humor), but makes it clear that this book is about providing information, not prescriptions.
I greatly appreciated her discussions of the origins and evolution of different recommendations (eg. pre-natal testing after 35, bed rest, fetal heart monitoring during labor, episiotomies); it’s really informative to see how best practices change from one generation to the next, and how sometimes practices lag behind research.
The introduction is available online at the Huffington post; I’d suggest checking that out to get a feel for the book. It’s a lot less controversial than many of the reviews below would have you believe.
Edit:
All the hoopla around the “pregnancy vices” chapter is overshadowing some of the other important contributions of this book. In the interest of helping you decide if the rest of the book is something you might find valuable:
One of the main themes of this book is that if you want to act in the best interest of your child, you need to figure out what “best” is. Your doctor can guide you, but you can and should have responsibility and agency in these matters.
To a lot of pregnant women, choices about alcohol, coffee, and food are easy– err on the side of utmost caution. Yet one thing Oster highlights is that most pregnancy-related choices aren’t so easily dealt with– in part because the costs and benefits aren’t always clear, and in part because even when they are, the alternatives *all* have costs and benefits worth weighing.
Expectant parents have to make choices, choices that involve real tradeoffs for both baby and mother. Non-invasive prenatal screening, amnio, or CVS? Schedule the induction, or not? Epidural, or not? Home, or hospital? This book does fantastic job of presenting the most credible, up-to-date estimates of the costs and benefits associated with each of these choices, and pinpoints particular things about your situation that that might make you weigh the costs and benefits differently than your friend, your OB, or Emily herself.
I think this is where the book excels, and really fills a void: chapters about topics that are less inherently buzz-worthy than booze, but perhaps even more difficult to navigate in a sea of murky data and misinformation. The prenatal testing chapter is particularly good.
Sofía Arévalo –
Información clara y útil. No hay mucha información de situaciones comunes como, niveles hormonales bajos, presión alta, y pros y cons en tomar aspirina para evitar restricciones de crecimiento y preclampsia.
Casilda Perez –
Es el único libro que me he leído para embarazadas porque está completamente basado en datos. Esta bien para desmentir algunos mitos y ayudarte con consejos importantes
AU-AU –
It’s a pity this book got caught up in a kerfluffle about alcohol, when that is about 1% of the books actual content (I’ve put *exactly* what the author says about it at the bottom of the review for all those negative reviewers who couldn’t be bothered reading the actual book!).
This book was hands down the most useful pregnancy book I read, not because it tells you what to do, but because it calmly presents the data on every major decision you’ll need to make during pregnancy, and then encourages you to form your *own* opinions based on it, instead of treating you like an idiot who can’t be trusted to understand anything other than black-and-white ‘rules’. As the author says:
“I teach my students that making good decisions requires two things. First, the right data. Second, the way to weigh the plusses and minuses of the decision *to you personally*…So naturally, when I did get pregnant I thought this is how pregnancy decision making would work too. Take something like amniocentesis. I thought my doctor would outline the plusses and minuses…She’d give me the data I needed. She’d then sit back, and my husband and I would discuss it and we’d come to a decision that worked for us. This is not what it was like *at all*”.
Every pregnant woman knows this feeling.
This book has the missing data that thinking parents need to help them make many of those decisions, including:
– What *really* happens to your odds of conception after 35?
– What is the evidence that having a cup of coffee will harm your baby? or 2 cups? 3 cups? Why is there so much conflicting advice on this?
– Same for alcohol, by trimester
– What is the likelihood of miscarriage each week? (I found this super reassuring)
– What is the statistical likelihood of issues arising from eating deli meats, eggs, fish, shellfish, soft cheeses, and sushi? How do you weigh up the omega 3 vs mercury risk for fish?
– What % of women are still experiencing morning sickness each week? Are your morning sickness symptoms ‘worse’ than the average woman and how risky are the drugs for it?
– What should you know before you make a decision to get antenatal testing for downs syndrome? Does amniocentesis really have a 1 in 200 risk of miscarriage? Is CVS more or less risky than amnio? (We ended up having the non-invasive test, while getting our results the doctor told us ‘you seem really well informed on this!’. Thanks Emily 🙂
– Is emptying the cat litter box as dangerous as gardening?
– Exactly how much airplane travel is risky?
– What are the real risks (and benefits!) of gaining more weight than the recommended amount?
– Is there anything that will help you correctly guess the gender?
– What’s the evidence on whether Kegels help?
– How can I understand the data on which drugs are safe during pregnancy?
– What is your chance of a pre-term birth, week by week? And what % of pre-term babies at each week will survive? (also reassuring)
– For full term babies, what is the chance of the baby arriving each week, if it didn’t come last week? Are there any studies than show symptoms the baby might come soon? Is there anything safe you can do to bring on labor if you are overdue?
– What are the risks and benefits of induction? Do you really need to be induced for ‘low amniotic fluid’?
– How long does the average labor really take?
– What, statistically, are the pros and cons of a c-section or an epidural? What about cord-clamping, homebirth, doulas, types of fetal monitoring, episiotomy, and cord blood storage?
– An example of an evidence-based birth plan is included, but emphasis given to choosing what works for you.
So, in summary, the data need to make your own important decisions along the way. Recommended read!
——–
Appendix: *Exactly* what this book says about alcohol during pregnancy:
“There is no question that very heavy drinking during pregnancy is bad for your baby. Women who report binge drinking during pregnancy are more likely to have children with serious cognitive defects. In one Australian study, women who binged in the second and third trimester were 15 to 20% more likely to have children with language delays than women who didn’t drink. This is repeated again and again in other studies. Binge drinking in the first trimester can cause physical deformities and in later trimesters, cognitive problems.
If you are binge drinking, stop.
However, this does not directly imply that light or occasional drinking is a problem. When I looked at the data, I found no credible evidence that low levels of drinking (a standard glass of wine or so a day) have any impact on your baby’s cognitive development”
(The author then goes on to review a number of studies in more detail, including an analysis of whether those studies correctly separated causation from correlation).
————
I did not read that as a licence to go drinking while pregnant. In fact, I read it and chose not to drink anyway (I was too morning sick to want anything to do with alcohol!). And I respected the author for giving me the evidence, and not blindly repeating something others had said.
Here’s to being treated with respect when you are pregnant, not like an idiot.
craig –
great book, lots of info, non bias
Heidi –
If you like to know the statistics and reason behind all the different do’s and don’t of pregnancy, this is the book for you. I love how facts and the quality of studies is the basis and you’re encouraged to make your own decisions on your own pregnancy with an informed mind.