Making Sense of Pregnancy: What Experts Want you To Know About Your Body
Have you been surprised by what we do and don't know about pregnancy and birth today? If you are pregnant, or have been in the past, this show helps you understand what's happening (or has happened) to our bodies--both the short term and long term effects of this transformation. We explore the boundaries of our scientific grasp on the wildly complex processes of pregnancy and birth.
After my complicated pregnancies, I went looking for answers and have interviewed hundreds of experts about women's health in this transition.
Every Tuesday you'll hear:
- Scientists at the cutting edge who are trying to uncover how pregnancy and birth work and what happens when they don't work
- Information you could use to better understand your own body in pregnancy
- .A better sense of the limits of your responsibility for what's happening inside your body
- Listen to hear what you won't find on a blogpost or a book off the shelf.
Episodes
56 episodes
Rebroadcast: Birth Trauma or Postpartum Depression? Understanding the Difference Matters, Conversation with Dr. Sharon Dekel
Current statistics suggest that postpartum depression is one of the most common complications of pregnancy in the US, estimated at between 1 in 10 and 1 and 5 women--and this estimate is mostly based on the response to survey responses.
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40:13
Targeting the Placenta: Gene Therapy as a new treatment for fetal growth restriction: Conversation with Dr. Helen Jones, Part 2
The very first construction project in pregnancy is the placenta. It's critical to the embryo's development, and problems with the placenta can have significant consequences for the baby. Since doctors have been able to identify fetal growth r...
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30:29
Can Gene Therapy fix the placenta? New hope for fetal growth restriction: Conversation with Dr. Helen Jones, Part I
If you're listening to this episode on placental gene therapy, you may wanna sit down. Today's guest walks us through a gene therapy that (a) doesn't change the chromosomal DNA of the mother or the fetus; that (b) can reverse (you ...
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22:45
The next generation of prenatal care: how computational biology is changing obstetrics: Conversation with Dr. Liat Shenhav and Dr. Matthew Hoffman
Many headlines exclaim the wonders of AI and medical research. What better place to leverage the advantages of AI than in research about pregnancy that positively impacts everyone's health, both in the present and the future? And by that ...
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35:30
The Science reshaping how we manage pregnancy: Year End recap, Part II
Never before in the history of humanity have we been able to examine a pregnancy in process and predict the risk of conditions before clinical symptoms have developed. Even 10 years ago, if you told an OB that you could reliably predict which ...
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22:13
The Science Reshaping How we understand the first trimester: Year End recap, Part I
Looking through some of the research I highlighted on the podcast this year gives me a real sense of hope about the future of pregnancy, and I hope it does for you too. There's good news and bad news. Let's get the bad news outta t...
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25:54
REBROADCAST: Making Birth Safer, a Conversation with Dr. Elliot Main
I am both hopeful and moved, AND filled with disbelief after my conversation with today's guest. He is an OB who has done an inordinate amount of work to make birth safer first for Californians, then for women across the country. H...
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33:54
Early Pregnancy Is a Dialogue: How Cell Signaling Shows Mothers and Embryos Collaborate: Conversation with Dr. D Stadtmauer, Part II
Many pregnancy complications cluster around issues with the placenta, the first fetal organ to form in a pregnancy. Here at the end of 2025, this organ still holds a significant amount of mystery. It's a wily organ that comes in many different...
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24:00
A placental origin story: what evolutionary biology can tell us, Conversation with Dr. Stadtmauer, part 1
How the placenta develops and the ways in which that development affect both the mother and the pregnancy have been a mystery since pregnancy became a subject of study. Much of medicine focuses on the symptoms that come from pregnancy com...
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25:31
Who is feeding the embryo while the placenta is under construction?
We all know the placenta as this life giving organ, the first to develop in pregnancy; a critical connection between mother and fetus that sends food and oxygen to the baby and eliminates the fetal waste products. Only recently did I trip over ...
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22:22
The Behind the Scenes work of your Immune system in preparing the Uterine lining for pregnancy: Conversation with Dr. Tamara Tilburgs, Part II
Why is an active immune system important both in pregnancy and before pregnancy when you're trying to prepare the uterine lining, AKA, the decidua? That was the topic of last week's conversation with Dr. Berg's, and this week we ta...
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28:23
When's the best time to intervene in the health of a pregnancy? Before it starts: Conversation with Dr. Tamara Tilburgs, Part I
Talk to any person who does research on pregnancy, and you may get a variety of different answers about the source of different pregnancy complications, and at what point in pregnancy we would have to turn back the clock to effectively interv...
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29:29
How we might manage early immune cell trouble in the placenta: Conversation with Dr. Nadkarni, part II
The very important role of a certain type of immune cell called neutrophils in pregnancy is the topic of today's episode. This is a continuation of the conversation we had last week with Dr. Suta NAD Carney, , who is a resear...
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25:16
How our most common immune cell can influence the most common birth defect: Conversation with Dr. Suchita Nadkarni, Part 1
Many pregnancy complications have a whodunit quality to them. Scientists don't yet understand exactly why things go wrong when they go wrong, but researchers tend to agree at this point that if there are issues with the placenta, the life...
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25:55
Is your Immune System shut off during pregnancy? (spoiler: NO)
Miscarriage and the failure of an embryo to implant are often attributed to issues with an aggressive immune system. Today I'm gonna tell you some stories about your immune system, and in particular how your immune system behaves in pregnancy,...
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26:15
Your Uterine Lining determines if and how a pregnancy progesses: Conversation with Dr. Jan Brosens, Part II
If you wanna know what factors contribute to miscarriages, you need to understand what factors contribute to and detract from making the uterus into a hospitable place for pregnancy, both implantation and development. My guest last week, Dr. J...
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26:19
Understanding Miscarriage through Evolutionary Biology: Conversation with Dr. Jan Brosens, Part I
Since women have been having babies they've experienced miscarriages. For nearly as long, we have not had a useful way to address miscarriage. Often doctors shrug at your first miscarriage and say it's a normal part of pregnancy. And if it aris...
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34:14
Tracking Placental Inflammation in a Pregnancy While its happening: Dr. Yong Wang, Part II
Last week we talked about the technology, originally used to look at inflammation in the brain and heart, applied to the placenta. This amazing form of MRI, which is both non invasive and safe, allows for real time information about inflammatio...
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25:45
Measuring Inflammation in the Placenta in real time: Conversation with Dr. Yong Wang, Part I
The placenta is critically important for the success of a pregnancy, being the physical connection between the mother's body and the developing fetus. Defects in the placenta tend to have significant consequences for the pregnancy and the fetus...
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21:03
The Science of Periods: What's really going on in your Uterus
This week we will focus on what in G-ds good name is going on in the uterus during your cycle. I don’t think I’m going too far out on a ledge to say that most of us consider our period an inconvenience at best, but when you hear some of the det...
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20:17
What is the role of the Corpus Luteum in reproductive health and fertility: Conversation with Dr. Kirk Conrad
Pregnancy can appear smooth when everything, or nearly everything goes according to plan--basically. But if you're part of the group of people for which it has not gone smoothly, in pursuit of what may have gone wrong, you find that this proces...
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45:28
The backstory of the Unsung Hero of Early Pregnancy: the Corpus Luteum
This week’s episode is the ‘Making Sense of Pregnancy’ version of the broadway play (and now movie) Wicked: it provides the back story of a critical character in pregnancy that you likely didn’t know enough about. It also ...
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17:21
Why Postpartum is not the "opposite" of pregnancy: Conversation with Dr. Uri Alon
If we wanted to bury the phrase “bounce back” to describe our expectation about how a body should respond in postpartum, I think today’s conversation can effectively do that. I talk to a researcher who has gathered the largest sampl...
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33:58
Can we predict miscarriage with an activity tracker? Conversation with Professor Benjamin Smarr, Part II
When it comes to categorizing pregnant women as high or low risk, we leave so much information on the table--which keeps us limited to the model where doctors use broad averages to triage care for pregnant women. Age is a definitive way to cate...
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Season 1
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29:00
Can an activity tracker tell you if you are pregnant? Conversation with Professor Benjamin Smarr, Part I
In the olden days, women measured something called basal body temperature (BBT), which is core temperature, to track ovulation by measuring their temperature right when they wake up--it's the first thing you'd do-- with a special thermometer th...
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24:57