There are some common minor complications of pregnancy that women may experience. Nothing too serious, just more of a pain or an inconvenience. The most troublesome for women tends to be nausea.
Some women have no morning sickness while others experience it all day long. Even though nobody likes to feel nauseous, it is actually a good thing. This is your body telling you that it has raised its threshold of what is acceptable to consume.
Even the smell of certain foods may send you off the deep end. Foods that you used to love seem super gross now, and you crave food that you would never have eaten before. You may even have some weird cravings.
I personally never experienced any of this. I was one of the lucky ones. I never even threw up during any of my pregnancies. I felt a little bit nauseous a couple of times, but that was it.
And I never had any weird cravings, although I did send my husband out at 10 o'clock one night to score me an apple turnover that was a life or death thing at the moment. I thought he got off pretty easy. So again, check out the list of minor inconveniences.
You may experience some of these, but you may not. If you are pregnant with one baby and are at ideal weight going into pregnancy, the best weight gain to sustain a healthy baby is about 30 pounds. If you go a full 40-week gestation, your baby will weigh seven and a half pounds.
Where does the rest of the weight go? Well, your breasts will double in size getting ready for lactation or nursing the baby once he or she is born. So that is typically a gain of two pounds.
Your uterus grows during pregnancy as your baby gets bigger. About two pounds goes to the growth of the uterus. And when you go to your OBGYN for checkups during pregnancy, your doctor will measure your uterus. They use a little tape measure and start at your pubic bone and measure up to the top of your uterus or the fundus. About 2 pounds goes to amniotic fluid, which you are constantly replenishing.
About 8 pounds to increased blood supply to support your pregnancy. About 7 pounds to increased nutrient stores to support the pregnancy. And about 2 pounds goes to the growth of the placenta.
Remember, in order to grow a healthy baby, you have to grow a healthy placenta. So there you go. That gives you about 30 pounds.
Keep in mind, while pregnant, Yes, your nutritional needs increase, you are building a baby, but that doesn't mean you get to eat twice as much as you currently are. Gaining an excessive amount of weight during pregnancy will bring on more complications for you and your baby. Conversely, this is not a time to diet.
Eat well, consume a nutrient-rich diet, and make sure to get enough folic acid in your daily diet. I'll talk about the reason for this in the next slide. Emotional stress can cause more issues than you may realize. Miscarriage, prematurity, low birth weight, all things I've discussed before that are devastating.
But if mama can't find a way to de-stress in a positive way, those stress hormones can also cause respiratory and digestive illness for the baby, colic, sleep disturbances, and general irritability. I've gone over information regarding the Rh factor, so I won't repeat information here. But remember, this is only an issue if mama is Rh negative and baby is Rh positive.
And ladies, remember, if you are 35 years old or more, you are considered of advanced maternal age, and statistically, you are at an increased risk for having a child with chromosomal abnormalities. I mentioned earlier in the prenatal lecture about the neural tube being one of the first things to begin developing. And remember, that will turn into the baby's brain and spine.
In order for the neural tube to develop properly, a pregnant woman needs to have adequate stores of folate or folic acid. If you have the luxury of planning your pregnancy about four to five months prior to trying to conceive, take a prenatal vitamin with folic acid. You need 400 micrograms of folate each day, ladies, before you become pregnant.
Once you become pregnant, Your need for folate doubles. You now need 800 micrograms per day to sustain neural tube development. Well, here's the deal. You can get 770 micrograms of folic acid if you eat three and a half ounces of chicken liver each day while pregnant.
That is your best source of folic acid. But I'm kind of guessing that most women don't want to eat chicken liver every day of their pregnancy. and you still aren't quite getting your full daily requirement of 800 micrograms.
If you aren't getting enough folate daily, your baby... can develop a neural tube defect. This may result in anencephaly.
Your baby's brain is underdeveloped and the skull is incomplete. A baby with anencephaly may be stillborn or only survive a few hours or days after birth. If you aren't getting enough folic acid, your baby may also be born with spina bifida, a birth defect in which your baby's spinal cord fails to develop properly.
It's kind of like a broken zipper. where the zipper opens up to reveal a hole. The higher up on the spine where the hole or broken zipper is, the more damage there is to the baby. Control of legs and bladder are the major issues, so make sure you have enough folate in your daily diet to support the development of your baby's neural tube. Oh goodness, back to that advanced maternal age magical number 35. Yes.
your risk increases for things like chromosomal abnormalities for your baby if you are over age 35 while pregnant. You are at a higher risk for high blood pressure, developing gestational diabetes, miscarriage, placenta previa, having to have a c-section delivery, having a premature birth, and having a stillbirth. People really scare you with this age risk factor. However, the big jump statistically really comes at age 40 to 45. Now I'm not trying to make light of this. it is important to understand your risks.
This chart shows you the increased risk of having a child with Down syndrome as you age. Down syndrome is the number one chromosomal abnormality we tend to see. It is also called trisomy 21, as there is an extra chromosome at the 21st site. So the individual has three chromosomes rather than two at that 21st site. So looking at the graph and the risk factor.
You see at age 35, your risk begins to increase, but it's still within the 0 to 0.5 range. But at age 39, you are now in the next percentage range. And for ages 40 to 45, your risk factor really climbs.
There is good news for older mamas. When you are older, going into parenthood, you are more experienced in life. So you tend to stress less and feel more confident in your abilities to handle situations. You are more likely to have a higher income, which brings more financial security and less worry.
Research has shown that children born to older mamas tend to perform better than children born to younger mothers, and those children also tend to live longer. It may be due to better resources available to them. There are also maternal risk factors for teenagers who are pregnant, and we sometimes forget to talk about that.
One of the biggest challenges is that a lot of pregnant teens often fail to get prenatal care, especially those teenagers who don't have the support of their parents. And unfortunately, there are a lot of kids who, once the parents find out they're pregnant, are so upset with the situation that they kick them out of the house. How could you do that to your kid, desert them when they needed you the most?
I don't get it. When I was doing my student teaching for my credential, I taught at an alternative high school for pregnant teens. And I was shocked to see that most of the girls didn't have any prenatal care because they were no longer living with their parents, were no longer on their parents' insurance, were living with friends or a boyfriend, and didn't have the means to get any insurance.
They didn't have a job that would even offer benefits. They were high school kids, maybe working a few hours a week at a fast food restaurant. I remember one student who was seven months pregnant and hadn't been to the doctor even once yet.
Pretty scary. Teens are more likely to engage in risky behavior that puts their developing baby at risk as well. When I worked with those pregnant teens, we would be in class, and I was trying to go over what was happening developmentally with their baby in utero, explaining the importance of good nutrition and healthy habits while they were eating a candy bar and drinking soda for lunch. I also caught many of them smoking on campus, and they were more concerned with getting into trouble for smoking, which was against the school rules. than being concerned with what the smoke was doing to their babies.
They didn't get it, but they were teenagers. They were just thinking about themselves in the moment, not really thinking about the future. Their teen brains were not processing the reality of their situation.
It was sad and frustrating. For pregnant teens under age 15, they have an increased risk of being anemic and having high blood pressure, which can be very dangerous for them. They also have an increased risk of having a baby with a low birth weight and being premature.
And unfortunately, they also have an increased risk for a repeat rebirth. We saw this at the alternative high school for pregnant teens. We had two 17-year-old girls there. the semester I was teaching who were on their second pregnancies.
When I was teaching, I was in my mid-20s and thought I had my life pretty together. I was working on my career. I had a solid boyfriend who I'd been with for years. I was close to my family. I felt I was doing well, but I wasn't ready to be a mom yet, and I couldn't imagine what some of these girls were facing.
Going into the birthing classes with the nursing staff freaked me out a little bit, but these girls were actually facing this in a few weeks. The school was open to the boyfriends of the girls, but only one attended. I thought this was a shame for a lot of reasons, but especially since the guys could benefit from learning a lot about pregnancy so they could better support their girlfriends, and in learning about the development of their baby so they could become good dads. What I learned was that a lot of the guys took off when they found out that their girlfriend was pregnant, and I learned that most of the guys were at least five years older than the girls. That posed another issue.
We had guys over age 18, legal adults, with underage girls. Some of the parents were pursuing legal action against these guys. Some of the girls were abused, either by their boyfriend or a family member. They were up against a lot. We even had two girls at the school who had the same baby daddy, and they were constantly fighting with each other.
I hate to paint this gloom and doom picture, but that's a reality in a lot of cases of pre or teen pregnancy. However, kudos to the girls who were in school because they at least knew it was important to get that high school diploma, and they were getting coursework in child development, and they had counselors available to them, and they had a nursing staff to teach them about labor and delivery, and they had Sac State interns setting them up with assistants to get prenatal care. Some of the girls even had internships with local businesses and were learning job skills, so after graduation and after the birth of their baby, they had potential means to earn an income and care for their baby.
But that's a difficult road, no doubt.