Making Sense of Pregnancy: What Experts Want you To Know About Your Body

The Science Reshaping How we understand the first trimester: Year End recap, Part I

Paulette Kamenecka

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 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 the way first. It's true that women's health has gotten the short end of the stick in terms of federal funding and research interest for far too long, and research on pregnant women has gotten an even shorter version of that stick. It's still considered niche research in many quarters, despite the fact that. Every existing person owes their existence to a pregnancy, and what happened in that pregnancy likely affected important aspects of their lifelong health. That's the bad news. 

The good news is research on topics around fertility, pregnancy, birth, and postpartum have dramatically increased over the last 30 years. So for today's end of the year episode, I'm gonna take a walk through a theoretical pregnancy that's happening today with a tourist's eye for some of the amazing research we covered on the show this year. Of course, I can't distill 50 conversations into a half an hour, but let's walk through early pregnancy and see how this research may reshape how we think about and manage the first trimester.