Sometimes It Just Sucks To Be Pregnant

Health officials in North Dakota are now recommending that pregnant women and children under 6 abstain from eating meat from animals that were killed using lead bullets. This recommendation comes on the heels of a study which found that people who eat wild game killed with lead bullets had higher levels of lead in their blood. So I guess that means we can add venison to the long, long list of things that pregnant ladies can't have. (I wonder what this means for low-income rural families whose primary source of food is what they've hunted themselves?)

Meanwhile, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has found that the incidence of employment discrimination against pregnant women is still going strong, even thirty years after the passage of the Pregnancy Discrimination Act.

Obviously, there are financial reasons why a firm might not want to hire a pregnant woman: her health insurance will be more expensive and she'll have to take some leave in the foreseeable future. Even so, if it can be proved that that's the only reason she wasn't hired, that firm could be facing the EEOC. "You can imagine the slippery slope," says Frye. "First it's, 'Don't hire a pregnant woman.' Then it becomes, 'Don't hire a woman at all, because she could get pregnant and is likely to be the primary caregiver.'"

Then there are the studies that suggest that pregnant women just plain gross some people out. In one, people who viewed videotapes of non-pregnant women and visibly pregnant women doing the same task judged the pregnant women more negatively (and no, the activity was not smoking. Or sit-ups.)

That bias may stem from an urge to give pregnant women lesser duties. "People may feel they're doing the right thing," suggests Frye. "But they're not."

The emphasis above is mine. I'll be looking into these pregnancy gross-out studies later.

I feel like I should apologize for my recent lack of posts. In all honesty, I get sort of bummed out sometimes reading and writing so much about pregnancy, all while we continue to struggle to conceive. It just starts so feel very, very masochistic after a while.