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
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 complications and tries to find a way to fix if not the problem, then the symptom.
Today's guest who looks at pregnancy with an evolutionary biology perspective that asks not only how the system works, but why the system works the way it does i.e. why are human placentas so invasive when other mammals have placentas that are not as invasive. Answers to the why questions can shape the ways in which we manage the how.
To find the paper we're discussion today, Cell ype and cell signalling innovations underlying mammalian pregnancy, see: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41559-025-02748-x