An interesting op-ed piece on the BBC website today. It reveals that research by the National Childbirth Trust reveals '39% of pregnant women and 56% of expectant fathers are now 'very' worried that something will be wrong with their baby.' Another charity, Tommy's reveals that '29% of pregnant women feel confused by all the conflicting advice they read.'
I don't think that either K___ or I are 'very' worried that something will be wrong with our baby. Probably the most stressful thing likely to happen is that it's a boy and not a girl as we think after the anatomy scan. But that's not to say that we haven't had concerns at times. I've documented numerous examples of where I've done a bit of research on something or other for the blog and thrown up wildly differing results.
I'm sure that we may have appeared to be more stressed about things than we actually are simply because I do deliberately search out items about pregnancy to write about, and more controvertial themes undoubtedly recieve more attention than more mundane issues. 'Baby did some kicks, everything fine' (which is the every day experience now) is far less interesting to anyone else than me reporting someone claiming that even looking at a quamquat will cause your child to grow a third eye.
Reading through the comments on the BBC story, I can't help but think that there's two fairly easy rules to follow;
1) Don't do things that even a six year old would know is potentially dangerous - smack, skydiving, smoking, pufferfish - especially not at the same time
2) If you're worried that anything else may be dangerous, then don't do that until you can ask a midwife for advice and remove the worry.
And, I suppose, rule 3):
Since waaaaaaaay before we could even conceive of all these terrible lurking dangers to our unborn children, humans have managed to successfully reproduce. That should say something.
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