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- Herausgeber: Myriad Editions
- Kategorie: Ratgeber
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014
Kate Evans deftly handles the physical and emotional changes that come with being pregnant, looking at the practicalities of every stage as well as the challenges that may arise. Her straightforward, funny and accessible text is illustrated throughout with detailed artwork to guide the reader through the intricacies of human reproduction whilst her customary laugh-out-loud cartoons demystify the complexities of pregnancy and birth. Contents include: • A graphic guide to conception • Practical help for those trying to conceive • Early pregnancy advice • Stop telling me what to do • Food, glorious food • The call of the duvet • Engaging with the professionals • Abortion rights and wrongs • Miscarriage support • Screening and scans • Are you ready to have a baby? • The physical preparations • Ripening and readying • Waiting well past your due date • The art of birth Labour • Push it real good • The Caesarian section
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There’s a lot in here that we don’t talk about. As I wrote it, I had to fight against a sense that this knowledge is unimportant because it is unspoken, when, of course, the inverse is true.
But there is something I’ve left out. Men. So I’d like to apologise, guys. I have referred to your experiences only tangentially. In this book, when I write ‘person’, I mean ‘woman’ by default, not ‘man’, which is a complete reversal of the normal order of things. (Ha! Now you know how it feels!) More could be written about how fertility, pregnancy and birth feels from the male perspective. I’ll lay down the gauntlet and hope that one of you picks it up.
And so I’ve ignored transgender men. There are men who have retained the biological ability to bear children from their previous sex. Good luck with your adventures, fellas. I hope you nd some of this book relevant, but I found it hard to untangle sex, gender and female identity when I wrote it. In fact, I didn’t want to, because so much of womanhood is uncharted territory.
I should also apologise to my children in advance: I’m going to make you turn off the
computer now that I’ve fnished writing this book.
There now follows a list of personal dedications that are irrelevant for a huge percentage of the readership. Thanks to Jabberwocky nursery for mothering my toddler while I’ve been busy authoring. Thank you, Mary Cronk, Denis Walsh, Joanna Ellington, Soo Downe, Rachel Reed, Emma Ashworth, Aurella Yussuf and Linda McQueen for your professional input. Thanks to Mipsy, Amy, Emma, Anna and Frankie Jo Magick, Anna Honesty, Mary, Ali, Joy Horner, Joy Hunt, Candida, Corinne, and Donach, I love you.
If you find nothing else to disagree with in this book, you may be dismayed by my use of the pronoun ‘them’ when referring to the singular unborn child. I thought it more elegant than the clunky ‘she stroke he’ and less impersonal than ‘it’. We do need gender-neutral language, particularly when discussing the baby in the womb, whose personhood can be felt before their sex can be identified.
This book is dedicated to midwives everywhere.
It’s Day 1* of your menstrual cycle. You just got your period.
You know you’re not pregnant, but your body is already plotting to change that.
Your ovaries have been gradually ripening up some eggs for months, and now a batch of about 12 of them is coming along nicely. Your pituitary gland starts to release increasing amounts of follicle- stimulating hormone (FSH), which stimulates the egg follicles to get busy, and then luteinising hormone (LH), which helps the eggs to mature.
The oestrogen feeds back to the brain to tell it to stop producing FSH, so the other egg follicles wither and die away.
It starts a new, thick endometrial lining growing on the inside of your womb.
It gets the inner lining of your womb pulsating to help the sperm swim up it.
The little wavy hairs, or cilla, that line the insides of your oviducts grow longer, and cells within the tubes fill them with fluid (we will find out what that’s for later).
And your cervix starts producing fertile juices.
Feeling fruity?
That is not all. Women change in more profound ways under the influence of oestrogen (‘oestrogen’ from the Greek ‘oistros’ meaning ‘sexiness’, and ‘gen’, meaning ‘producer’). In fact, a minor cottage industry has sprung up among psychologists testing all aspects of human behaviour on fertile women. (I’ve cited all my references here because the titles are hilarious.)
When you are fertile, you smell nicer,1 your voice becomes higher and sounds sweeter,2 and you walk more sexily.3 Your skin feels softer. Unsurprisingly, in all these aspects, men rate fertile women as more attractive: researchers have found that lap dancers make more money when they are ovulating.4
Heterosexual women are more interested in men when they are ovulating. They are more likely to look at other men besides their partners5 and they report that their partners are more possessive and jealous (I wonder why).6 Fertile women find it easier to tell whether men are straight or gay.7
The one man a fertile woman is not interested in, however, is her dad. He’s not a good potential mate, so she’s statistically less likely to phone him when she’s about to ovulate.8
You are more easily sexually aroused when you’re fertile (it all feels more lush down there).9 You might have more sexual fantasies, potentially featuring more sexual partners (blush!).10 You’ll want to spend more money on beauty products,11 wear sexier and more revealing clothes,12 and then go dancing in them.13 You’re less hungry when you’re fertile, so you eat less (but you make up for that later in the month).14
This is important information! We should be told this stuff. Our education about the menstrual cycle should be more meaningful than the talk that the Tampax lady gave us at school. This makes sense of the wild swings in sexual desire that can mean that you fancy the pants off someone one (fertile) week, yet feel distinctly unthrilled when you get a date with them a week later. It explains the following cyclical variation in my relationship with my knickers...
(1) ‘Body odor attractiveness as a cue of impending ovulation in women’, Gildersleeve et al, Hormones and Behaviour, Vol 61, pp.157–66, February 2012.
(2) ‘The unique impact of menstruation on the female voice: implica- tions for the evolution of menstrual cycle cues’, Pipitone and Gallup,Ethology, Vol 118, pp.281–91, March 2012.
(3) ‘Differences in gait across the menstrual cycle and their attractive- ness to men’, Provost et al., Archives of Sexual Behaviour, Vol 37, pp.598–604, August 2008.
(4) ‘Ovulatory cycle effects on tip earnings by lap dancers: economic evidence for human estrus?’, Miller et al., Evolution and Human Behavior, Vol 28, pp.375–81, 2007.
(5) ‘Fertility in the cycle predicts women’s interest in sexual opportun- ism’, Gangestad et al., Evolution and Human Behaviour, Vol 31, pp.400–11, November 2010.
(6) ‘Conditional expression of women’s desires and men’s mate guarding across the ovulatory cycle’, Haselton, MG, & Gangestad, SW,Hormones and Behavior, Vol 49, pp.509–18, 2006.
(7) ‘Mating interest improves women’s accuracy in judging male sexual orientation’, Rule et al., Psychological Science, Vol 22, pp.881–6, July 2011.
(8) ‘Kin affiliation across the ovulatory cycle: females avoid fathers when fertile’, Leiberman, D et al., Psychological Science, Vol 22, pp.13–18, January 2011.
(9) ‘Women’s sexual experience during the menstrual cycle: identifi- cation of the sexual phase by noninvasive measurement of lutenizing hormone’, Bullivant et al., The Journal of Sex Research, February 2004.
(10) ‘Sexual fantasies and viewing times across the menstrual cycle: a diary study’, Dawson, SJ et al., Archives of Sexual Behaviour, Vol 41, pp.173–83.
(11) ‘Do women feel worse to look their best? Testing the relationship between self-esteem and fertility status across the menstrual cycle’, Hill, SE and Durante, KM, Personality and Social Psychology, Vol 35, pp.1592–601.
(12) ‘Changes in women’s choice of dress across the ovulatory cycle: Naturalistic and laboratory task-based evidence’, Durante, KM et al., Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, Vol 34, pp.1451–60.
(13) ‘Conditional expression of women’s desires and men’s mate guarding across the ovulatory cycle’, Haselton, MG and Gangestad, SW, Hormones and Behavior, Vol 49, pp.509–18, 2006.
(14) ‘The right time for a woman to diet?’, New Scientist, 25 April 1992.
Back to the hormones: on Day 13 of your perfect, textbook female cycle, something flips in your pituitary gland and it sends out a surge of LH and FSH.
This does something funny to the maturing egg. The egg is one cell. Inside its nucleus, as with every other cell in your body, is your DNA (six feet of it!) tightly coiled into 46 X-shaped molecules known as chromosomes. Now, as the egg matures, it subdivides, keeping only half its original chromosomes, and spitting 23 of them out.
On the morning of Day 14 out gushes the egg, in a protective covering of sticky granulosa cells, with a burst of follicular fluid. It’s very small. It’s smaller than this .
Despite its tininess, the oviduct swoops round to find it and with its crazy fingery things, the fimbria, it swooshes it gently into the tube.
Some women can tell! Watch out for a twingeing pain, or a dull ache, low down in your belly on one side or the other. You can also tell which side ovulation occurs because the lymph gland at the top of that leg will be slightly swollen. Apparently, the lips of your vulva swell slightly more on that side too.
(I suppose it’s a good excuse to get your partner to spend some time down there, investigating.) Some women bleed when they ovulate, just a spot, or quite a bit, so a very light, very short period could be ovulation, not menstruation.
What’s going to happen to this egg? Er, nothing. There’s no sperm around. We get to the fish part of our story later.
The egg disappears off into your oviduct and disintegrates within the next 24 hours. But! Your ovary isn’t finished yet! Oh, no, that follicle is still busy. It collapses down, turns yellow, acquires the name ‘corpus luteum’, and starts pumping out progesterone.
Progesterone also makes your breasts grow bigger (more potential baby food). They swell, very slightly, in the second half of your cycle and, you may be pleased to know, they don’t shrink back again completely afterwards. So, up to the age of 35, your breasts keep growing. Woohoo!
Progesterone stops your pituitary from producing any more LH or FSH. We don’t need any more eggs just yet.
Progesterone makes you hotter, by between a quarter and half of a degree Fahrenheit.
Feeling fractious?
Not everyone will find this to be true, but, statistically, you are more likely to experience reduced sex drive, constipation, bloating, insomnia, increased appetite and acne in the post-ovulatory part of your cycle. You’re also more likely to be depressed.
And you just might be more irritable.
Premenstrual symptoms can be no laughing matter. If you’re suffering, keep a diary of your menstrual cycles and moods to show to your GP. Reflexology and acupuncture claim success for alleviating the symptoms of PMS. The herbal supplement Vitex agnus castus has been proven to help15: the dosage is 40mg daily, first thing in the morning, so you need to source 20mg tablets, not 5mg ones.
Try less caffeine and alcohol and more exercise, wholefoods, fresh fruits and vegetables.
Sperm are amazing.16
Have a look. Each one is five and a half hundredths of a millimetre long, so you’ll need a microscope. Fortunately. It would be a bit freaky if you could see them with the naked eye.
Our potential dad has favoured quantity over quality when boshing this lot out. Some sperm have two heads, some have two tails, some can’t swim straight, some are already dead.
We don’t actually need five hundred million sperm to fertilise our egg. We only need one. So the female body operates a veiy selective entry system, to let in only the best sperm, while ruthlessly eliminating any unwanted intruders.
Let’s hope that this encounter with sperm is taking place in a romantic atmosphere, because sexual excitement is going to help the sperm survive.17
Your vagina is naturally, anti-bacterially, slightly acidic, and remember, acid kills sperm. Leucocytes (white blood cells) there kill foreign invaders – germs, but also sperm. But when you become aroused, your sexy juices give your vagina a sperm-friendly protective coating. And orgasm then helps suck friendly juices and sperm out of the vagina and into the womb.*
Unfortunately, we live in a sexist world, and although there are a lot of depictions of heterosexual sex around, very few of them do justice to female sexuality. You would think, from watching the movies or surfing the net, that…
• Women are extremely skinny, yet have massive, bouncy breasts, and are entirely hairless.
• Frantic deep thrusting is the correct way to have sex.
• Women gain the most pleasure and fulfilment from giving men oral sex.
• Having sex when drunk is a good idea.
• Sex is a performance, not an experience.
If you reverse these assumptions, I predict a lot more orgasms.
I also think that expecting a male partner to provide all the clitoral stimulation during sex is an
unreasonable amount of multi-tasking for a man to handle.
We refer to a man ‘penetrating’ a woman’s vagina. Ouch! The word ‘vagina’ actually comes from the Latin for ‘scabbard’, the thing you put your sword in. There are not meant to be swords involved! It’s just as accurate to say that the woman ‘engulfs’ the man’s penis. Just a thought.
We don’t even have a proper name for our genitalia.** ‘Vagina’ refers to the inside part, ‘clitoris’ to the sensitive button at the front, and ‘vulva’ to the lips at each side. But what we think of as a clit is just the tip of an iceberg: an amazing, hidden, wishbone-shaped network of erectile tissue that extends through the lips of your vulva, outer and inner, and around the walls of your vagina. Just the little tip that you can feel with your finger has 8,000 nerve-endings. That’s twice as many as a penis.
Yes, you read that right, we have erectile tissue too! It’s not just a hole. It swells and stretches. It can shift shape just as much as a man’s bits can. It’ll do some amazing transformations by the end of this book! So explore and have fun. And it’s not only women who benefit from good quality lovemaking. When a man has more prolonged, tantalising and loving sex, he draws sperm from further back in the testicles; he ejaculates healthier sperm, and more of them.18
Just in case 250,000,000 wasn’t enough.
Man has evolved a delivery system that deposits the sperm as dose to the cervix as it can get. (Although, as mentioned earlier, you can substitute a turkey baster or an oral medicine syringe.)
But that’s not all he deposits…
Sperm arrive in a gel of semen. On a veiy simple level, semen forms a soft jelly that helps stop the sperm from falling out of the vagina immediately. But, take a closer look!
Semen is a potent love potion containing a whole bunch of feel-good chemicals: serotonin, prolactin, estrone, thyrotropin-releasing hormone and oxytocin, all rounded off with the sleep hormone melatonin. There is evidence that women who are regularly (and willingly!) exposed to human semen tend to suffer from depression less than women who aren’t. Semen gets you hooked on your man!19
Semen is sneakily multi-functional. It contains LH and FSH to help ripen your eggs and trigger ovulation. It’s a conspiracy! It is actually trying to get you pregnant! And, in case you’re already pregnant, it also contains the hormones human chorionic gonadotropin and human placental lactogen, to help maintain the pregnancy.20
Semen, being alkaline, also counteracts the acidity of the vagina. And although the anti- microbial agents in the vagina will kill sperm, with several hundred million sperm there, some of them are going to make it.
What happens next depends on the quality of your cervical juices. If you have infertile juice, as previously stated, nothing gets in that cervix. Game over.
