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.
Making Sense of Pregnancy: What Experts Want you To Know About Your Body
How to Make a Placenta: A User's Guide
This week's episode is kind of a how to episode. It's how do you grow a placenta, an entirely new organ, and quickly. Probably a more accurate title would be how do we think we might grow a placenta? How does a placenta develop? Maybe because in truth we have by no means worked out all of the details about how this critical life-giving organ is formed.
Having said that, let's run through some of what we think we know today.
Growing the placenta is kind of like establishing a fetal embassy inside the united organs of you. It's subject to the laws and customs of the mother country expressed through her chemistry and the condition of her body. But the embassy has ways to get what it needs. Today, I'll highlight what we think is going on and the ways in which we're able to track this progress while it's going on, and what we can do if we run into trouble.