the Pill changes women's brains

From MSNLifestyle via Instapundit:

In men, the androgens released at puberty are known to remodel the brain. This is also true in women, where relatively small quantities of testosterone can cause certain areas to shrink and others to grow.

so did anyone bother to check it out?

...One of the first such studies was conducted only eight years ago - after the pill had already been in use for 50 years. Dr Pletzer recruited a mixture of men and women on and off hormonal contraception, then scanned their brains. What she found was striking. The scans revealed that several brain areas were larger in the women on the pill, compared to those of women who weren't.

These areas just so happened to be larger in men than women, too. The study involved a relatively small sample and didn't separate androgenic and anti-androgenic contraception, so Dr Pletzer cautions against reading too much into the results. But other research has hinted that both types of hormones actually may be changing our behaviour.

It turns out that women taking pills with androgenic progestins have lower verbal fluency. They were also better at rotating objects. This makes sense, since men are thought to be slightly less articulate than women in certain situations and have better spatial awareness. Other studies have found that women on oral contraception remember emotional stories more like men - recalling the gist more than the details. They're also not as good at recognising emotions in others, such as anger, sadness, or disgust - just like men. It looks suspiciously like certain types of pill are "masculinising" women's brains....

As Dr Pletzer wrote in 2014, when athletes take steroids we call it 'doping' - it's considered abuse and strongly condemned by society. But we are happy for millions of women to take these hormones every day, sometimes from puberty to menopause. Scientists do not yet know if any of the pill's effects on the brain have much of an impact on our behaviour. But perhaps it is time we put it to the test. - 

on the other hand, the alternative might be ten kids, or ten abortions, so maybe it's okay.

It's the placenta stupid

many many years ago, when a lot of us GP's got out of Obstetrics because of the sudden huge increase in our malpractice insurance due to lawsuits over brain damaged babies, we were told that we should have all placentas examined for inflammatory and other changes, to prove the brain damage occured before birth (i.e. toxins, viruses, etc).

Science Daily reports on one prenatal cause that has been dicovered that are causes of dead babies or late miscarriages.

The role of the placenta in fetal development is being seriously under-appreciated according to scientists. A team studied 103 mutations linked to prenatal death in mice and showed that almost 70 percent affect the placenta. The team also found that some placenta defects could be directly linked to the cause of death. As such, a significant number of prenatal deaths may be due to the placenta, not just the embryo.

fake science fad found phfishy

Science Daily:

No, you don't get a lot of iron if you eat your placenta.

no, this is not something I had run across in my cross cultural experience: I have no doubt that there is a tribe somewhere that does this, (Wikipedia article) but I haven't worked with any of the tribes mentioned, and indeed, it is hard from the Wikipedia article to tell if this was a common practice or just sometimes done.

 In Africa, one of the important jobs of the midwife was to bury the placenta, so it would not be eaten by dogs or hyenas (and would not be unearthed and used for witchcraft spells).

so guess what? It is a fad of the affluent.

Placentophagy is an increasingly popular trend in industrialized countries throughout Europe, in Australia and in the U.S.. Proponents of the practice often reference placentophagy's common occurrence among nearly all mammals in nature, and they suggest it offers numerous benefits to human mothers too, including increased energy, improved mood, and more rapid postpartum recovery.

YUM! Chocolate covered Placentas!



not noted: The reason that animals eat the placenta is to keep the nest clean of odors. They also eat their babies' feces and probably their urine because they lick those areas to encourage the small ones to do their thing.

I should also note that our dogs eat their dead babies too, if they are stillborn. Once I had to remove one from our dog Sophie/s throat because she couldn't swallow it.

The King's midwife

TYWKIWDBI has a photo of a birthing eduation doll used by Madame Coudray

Angélique-Marguerite du Coudray was a famous 18th century midwife and designed this mannequin to teach midwife trainees about delivering babies. Louis XV learned of her expertise and asked her to set up courses throughout France. From 1759-1779 she traveled the country with her mannequin and published her Abrégé de l’Art des accouchements (Abridged Art of Child Delivery)

actually, we used a similar mannequin to teach our midwifry students in Africa...


book about Mrs. Coudray HERE....they used to let you read it on line, and it was interesting but boring...alas, no longer: You have to shell out money to even check it out. This site says you can read it on line, but it's not loading for me.

nowadays, they have big expensive mannequins to teach you how to deliver a baby. LINK...

well, the dirty little secret is that you learn how to deliver a baby by...delivering a baby...see one, do one, teach one...but few women are willing to be "guinea pigs" for half  trained residents nowadays...

and since things like breech births with extended arms or face presentations are rare, maybe the way of the future is training with such birth simulators so you can do it "automatically" when these rare things occur.

Childbirth in the good old days

Medievalist web has an article on maternal death in Anglo Saxon days.

full article HERE.

Oakington is the site of an early Anglo-Saxon cemetery in Cambridgeshire (AD 450–700). Excavated in June 2011, grave 57 contained a woman with a descended foetus across her pelvic cavity, a position unlikely to result from post-mortem extrusion. She was aged between 25 and 30, had congenitally absent teeth and occupational wear on her hands and feet. She was buried supine in full dress with a cruciform brooch and two small long brooches. The foetus lay low and transverse across her pelvis, which was probably the cause of this double fatality (. Even today transverse lie pregnancy is a dangerous malpresentation for both mother and foetus, almost always resulting in Caesarean section.

 yes, transverse lie means the kid is sideways. Usually this is found in women with a weak uterus (a woman who has had many pregnancies) although it can also occur in the second twin, where after the first one delivers, the second twin flops sideways in the now roomier uterus.

the relationship of the long axis of the fetus to that of the mother; see also presentation.

longitudinal lie a situation in which the long axis of the fetus is parallel to that of the mother; in presentation, either the head or breech presents first.

The only way to get the baby to deliver is to rotate it first, or do a Caesarian section.

If the uterus is soft, you might be able to rotate it externally, by using pressure to change the baby to head down (or buttock down).  Th.e baby will then deliver normally

An alternative is to put your hand inside and rotate the baby around, then either let him deliver normally or grab his leg and pull him out as a breech birth.

Sometimes you first recognize the transverse lie with the kid's hand pops out.

I wrote about this at Xanga: a story told by one of our old Sisters in Africa. She was a teacher who did first aid, and was called to the village because there was a problem with a woman in labor, and the women there didn't know what to do.

The woman quickly relaxed when she saw sister, and went on to deliver a nice girl baby, but then a hand popped out. Sister Gervasia, a farmer's daughter, knew that this meant trouble but wasn't sure what to do. So she told the family: We sisters have to pray now, but I'll be back in a little while after our prayers.  So she rushed home, got the first aid book out, read up on the problem, and returned to the village. She managed to push the hand back and externally rotate the baby, and voila, a baby boy.

The mother was lucky: You can rupture the uterus turning a child, and sometimes the uterus is lax after the delivery and mom dies of post partum hemorrhage (usually we give ergotrate for this, although nowadays we use pitocin).

I doubt many US docs have seen the problem, unless mom has an abnormal uterus, but it is still seen in Africa, as this journal article shows.

Eighty percent of the women were delivered abdominally; and 63.33% of these were cesarean deliveries. Vaginal
delivery was achieved in 13.33% of the women, vaginal route destructive operations and delivery in conduplicatio corpore on two occasions each

 If you want the gory examples of that last part, check here (Not safe for work or kids or for those with a queezy stomach). it's from a book by Maurice King, who has written other practical books for docs working in really isolated hospitals in Africa. King's stuff tends to be very pragmatic, and if you are a survivalist, you might want to download the book.

Again, these things are very very dangerous to mom, so don't try them at home. 

another resource would be Hesperian.

home birth types in the US need to watch the BBC series "call the midwife" to see all the stuff that can go wrong in even low risk "home births"...I don't recommend it, even though 80 percent of women could give birth without problems...

Back to early England.

There is the possibility of other women who died in Childbirth:

There are other examples of women with in situ foetuses from Anglo-Saxon cemeteries. However, in archaeology the dominant interpretation for extruded and partially extruded foetuses is currently a phenomenon known as coffin birth: the post-mortem extrusion of a foetus into the grave

 A couple years back, a gruesome murder case of a pregnant woman was verified when the baby was found on the beach near to where the husband had buried his pregnant wife whose body had been weighted down...why these deliveries? It's the gas...(don't ask).

There are also stories of children being taken from mom's womb when she died, (MacDuff was from his mother's womb untimely ripped"), the idea being that maybe the kid would live, and also to baptize the kid.

One suspects such cases are rare, since usually the baby dies of exhaustion before mom dies of exhaustion, but in cases of amniotic fluid embolism or heart attack in a mom with a damaged heart, it could happen.