Tuesday, February 19, 2008

Miscarriage News Round-Up: First Half of February

The following articles appeared in the first half of February:

  • A fairly short piece in the Chicago Daily Herald raising awareness of miscarriage, its possible causes, and testing that can be done in cases of recurrent pregnancy loss.
  • I'm a bit uncomfortable about the source of this bit, but it appears that France's Supreme Court has ruled that parents who miscarried may register names for their children regardless of the stage at which the loss occurred. They may also recover the body of the child from the hospital and may be entitled to take maternity leave.
  • British footballer admits to having lied when he said he missed games due to the deaths of his grandmothers, later saying the truth was that his girlfriend miscarried. Do people have that little sympathy for miscarriage that we have to invent the deaths of our elderly relatives? And/or does this guy just have other issues?
  • Doctors in Colorado performed a cauterization surgery to prevent the loss of twins to TTTS. For some reason, TTTS ranks high on my list of things that scare the crap out of me, even though I'm not having twins, so this calmed my fears a bit for everyone I know pregnant with twins sharing a placenta.
  • According to this story, a woman in the UK is told she miscarried and offered a D&C or the drugs to hasten the process. She decided to wait to miscarry naturally. A month later, she learned she was still pregnant with a healthy fetus. These stories also scare the crap out of me. Additional coverage here.
  • Additional criticism of the study linking caffeine consumption and miscarriage risk (and the hoopla that followed) available here and here. Additional positive article here.

2 comments:

HereWeGoAJen said...

Those stories scare me too! I think that was part of the reason I went with the natural way myself.

Sushilover said...

Great stories K. I did not know about the twin syndrome...that is scary...and that completely sucks about the other lady (although I guess it's great that her baby made it but what an awful way to find out)...I think if I wouldn't have measured so poorly for my first miscarriage (was supposed to be 12 weeks but was showing a 7.5 week embryo) I would have waited on my D&C...but you always have to wonder. And I always love a good "Caffeine causes miscarriage" story considering I've read a ton of journals and blogs of pregnant women that still do drink caffeine daily and did so before they got pregnant. Sigh. Will they ever learn? My mom smoked consistently when pregnant with me and I made it...I can't imagine a cup of coffee a day is supposed to be worse. Anyways thanks for sharing I'm always interested in these.