Читать книгу Blooming Birth: How to get the pregnancy and birth you want - Lucy Atkins - Страница 6

Brace yourself. You are pregnant. You’re probably floating in a world of stupendous self-admiration right now (you’re growing an actual, real BABY in there). But you may also have noticed that people now want to start scaring you about all the things that could go wrong. This will get worse. Over the next nine months you will be fed a load of neurosis-inducing claptrap about what you must eat, drink, breathe, think and do to keep that baby ‘safe’. There will be some good, solid, sensible information in there – things you really need to know – but it can be hard to isolate this from the endless conflicting advice you’ll get on how to ‘optimize’ your chance of producing a healthy baby. Pregnancy, these days, has become pathology. Friends, relatives, colleagues, books, websites, health professionals and even complete strangers will conspire to fill you with fear, guilt and self-doubt. You’d think it was some insane, risky, reckless ordeal you’re embarking on, not something basically ordinary, that women have successfully achieved since time began. In this chapter we’ll give you the ‘need to know’ information, and hopefully lay some of the neuroses to rest.

We won’t provide you with medical minutiae about obscure conditions or rare complications. Other books have done this far better than we ever could (though we’ll give you resources and ideas of where to look if you need to know more). Instead, we’re going to give you a solid sense of some of the oddities you might experience over the next nine months, along with practical tips from professionals and other women about how to handle them. We’ll show you that you can, indeed, have a basically healthy pregnancy whilst remaining a viable member of ordinary society.