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.

Babies In Beijing - Poisoned?!

I already have every intention of breastfeeding my future children if at all possible, and here is yet another reason to motivate me: Formula, like any other commercial product, is subject to quality oversights within the industry. I want to breastfeed for the same reason that I prefer to cook (and eventually, grow) my own food: because I know where it's been.

Remember that awful scare when melamine got into various pet foods and thousands of cats and dogs were sickened or even died because of it? Yeah, well it happened again, only this time the melamine was deliberately added to infant formula, and three babies have already died and over a thousand more are suffering.

China's largest producer of milk, Mengniu Dairy Group, announced the recall of three batches of formula made in January after tests showed they were contaminated with melamine, said Li Changjiang, China's director of quarantine and inspection.

Though it should not be added to food ingredients, suppliers in China sometimes put it in food to make a product appear to be protein rich. Melamine has nitrogen, and standard tests for protein in bulk food ingredients measure levels of nitrogen.

More than 1,300 infants are hospitalized with illnesses including malnutrition, kidney stones and acute renal failure.

Apparently the formula was watered down by the manufacturers to save money, then melamine was added to the diluted formula so that it could pass quality checks for protein. The two men who contaminated the formula are facing the possibility of execution.

I'd like to think that such a severe quality failure with such serious repercussions wouldn't happen in the US, but I work in Quality Assurance myself. No system is perfect, and one person can perfectly fuck shit up on a massive level with just a little bit of carelessness. The more control I have over what is going into my infant's stomach, the happier and less anxious I will be.