It's National Midwifery Week!

Each year during National Midwifery Week, midwives across the US raise awareness of the midwifery profession and the services they provide to the women they serve. From pizza parties to poetry readings, the celebrations are as diverse as the profession of midwifery.

The University of Indianapolis School of Nursing is marking the observance of National Midwifery Week by joining in the annual Blankets for Babies campaign, collecting new and gently used baby, toddler and maternity items for distribution by local organizations that support babies and mothers.

The American College of Nurse-Midwives and its 7,000-plus members are observing National Midwifery Week from Oct. 4 to 11 to point out the positive role these care providers can play in reducing healthcare costs and lowering the rate of Cesarean section, among other benefits. In addition to caring for women during pregnancy, nurse-midwives work with physicians to offer a full range of services to women from adolescence through menopause and help them make informed choices about their health care.

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Mary Cheney Pregnant Again

Mary Cheney, daughter of former Vice President Dick Cheney, is pregnant with her second child, due in mid- to late-November. Cheney confirmed her pregnancy to the Web site True/Slant, which first reported it.

Cheney and her longtime female partner, Heather Poe, will raise the baby along with her 2-year-old son, Samuel David Cheney. She has never disclosed the paternity of either of her children.

After the baby is born, Mary Cheney will take maternity leave from the communications firm she's worked for, and then start a new consulting firm with her sister, Liz Cheney.

Though Dick Cheney is well known as a social conservative, he spoke in favor of gay marriage in June at the National Press Club:

"As many of you know, one of my daughters is gay and it is something we have lived with for a long time in our family. I think people ought to be free to enter into any kind of union they wish. . . . The question of whether or not there ought to be a federal statute to protect this, I don't support. I do believe that . . . historically the way marriage has been regulated is at the state level. It has always been a state issue and I think that is the way it ought to be handled."

After Mary Cheney's first child was born in March 2007, conservative James Dobson of Focus on the Family wrote a critical commentary in Time magazine titled "Two Mommies Is One Too Many."

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This Week's Celebrity Baby Bumps

Padma Lakshmi looks beautiful in her cute black dress, Christina Milian bumps it up in a satiny dress, Marcy Rylan goes shopping in tie-dye, Heidi Klum wraps it up in all black, Rebecca Gayheart accentuated her bump in stripes, and Jenna Elfman wears a really neat black and white dress on the Bonnie Hunt show.

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Odd Places to Put Ultrasound Pictures

There are some odd places where you can apply your ultrasound pictures. You could put one on your hat, or on a throw pillow, put it on a mouse pad or a button. Put one on your tie or even on your kid's shoe.

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Warning on licorice in pregnancy

Pregnant women who eat large amounts of licorice could negatively affect their child's intelligence and behavior, according to research.

Experts from Edinburgh and Helsinki universities studied eight-year-olds born in Finland, where consumption of licorice among young women is common.

The children of women who ate a lot of licorice when pregnant did not perform as well as other youngsters in tests.

Researchers said a component in licorice may impair the placenta.

They said the component - glycyrrhizin - may allow stress hormones to cross from the mother to the baby.

High levels of such hormones, known as glucocorticoids, are thought to affect fetal brain development and have been linked to behavioral disorders in children in previous studies.

Of the children who took part in the Finnish study, 64 were exposed to high levels of glycyrrhizin in licorice, 46 to moderate levels and 211 to low levels.

They were tested on a range of cognitive functions including vocabulary, memory and spatial awareness.

Behavior was assessed using an in-depth questionnaire completed by the mother.

The results suggested that women who ate more than 500mg of glycyrrhizin per week - found in the equivalent of 100g of pure licorice - were more likely to have children with lower intelligence levels and more behavioral problems.

The eight-year-olds were more likely to have poor attention spans and show disruptive behavior such as attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), the researchers said.

The research comes after a study which suggested that licorice consumption was also linked to shorter pregnancies.

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BPA During Pregnancy Linked to Female Aggression

A new study adds to the growing concern that prenatal exposure to the chemical bisphenol A could harm children's development.

In the study of 249 pregnant women, the first to examine the effects of BPA on children's behavior, researchers found that girls whose mothers had the highest levels of BPA during pregnancy were more aggressive and hyperactive at age 2 than other girls. Findings appear today in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives.

Girls were more likely to be aggressive if their mothers had high levels of BPA — an estrogen-like chemical used in many consumer products — early in pregnancy or at about 16 weeks, the study says. A typical pregnancy lasts 40 weeks.

The girls had aggression scores that were similar to those of boys, as measured by a commonly used test, says co-author Joe Braun of the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. Boys appeared unaffected by BPA.

Braun says he plans to follow children until age 5, because behaviors can change over time.

Michelle Macias, a doctor and spokeswoman for the American Academy of Pediatrics, notes that the increases in aggression were subtle. "Nothing in this study suggests that these kids have higher rates of behavioral disorders," Macias says.

Hugh Taylor, an obstetrician/gynecologist at Yale University School of Medicine, notes that the new findings closely match the animal studies.

And Taylor says the study raises concerns about the effect of exposing a fetus to an artificial substance that mimics estrogen. Although estrogen is often considered a "female hormone," it actually helps to "masculinize" the male brain around the 11th and 12th weeks of pregnancy, says neurobiologist Louann Brizendine, author of The Female Brain.

"In the developing brain, timing is everything," Brizendine says. "I'm worried that tiny amounts of this stuff, given at just the wrong time, could partly masculinize the female brain."

Co-author Bruce Lanphear, a pediatrician at BC Children's Hospital in Vancouver, says there's already enough evidence to show that pregnant women should reduce their exposure to BPA. "We could end up doing a lot of harm by not acting," he says.

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Antidepressants Raise Risk of Pre-Term Birth: Study

Danish women who took antidepressants during pregnancy had twice the risk of pre-term delivery as other women, and their babies were more likely to be admitted to an intensive care unit than those of women who did not take the drugs, researchers reported on Monday.

They said antidepressants, known as selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors or SSRIs, which affect a message-carrying brain chemical called serotonin, may raise the risk of pre-term delivery and affect a baby's health at birth.

Some prior studies have found that drugs in this class can cross the placenta and appear in the umbilical cord blood of babies whose mothers have taken them.

"The study justifies increased awareness to the possible effects of intrauterine exposure to antidepressants," Dr. Najaaraq Lund of the Bandim Health Project in Guinea-Bissau, and colleagues wrote in the Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine.

About one in 10 pregnant women experience depression during pregnancy. Because depression can jeopardize a pregnant woman's health, doctors often prescribe antidepressants, but it is not yet clear how these drugs affect a baby's health.

To study this, Lund and colleagues analyzed data on 57,000 pregnancies and deliveries at Aarhus University Hospital in Skejby, Denmark, between 1989 to 2006.

They identified 329 pregnancies in which the mothers took an SSRI medication, another 4,902 with a history of psychiatric illness not treated with an antidepressant, and 51,700 with no history of psychiatric illness.

Women who took antidepressants while pregnant delivered their babies five days earlier than other women in the study, and had twice the risk of pre-term delivery than women with no history of psychiatric illness.

Babies exposed to antidepressants during pregnancy were far more likely than those in the other two groups to have a five-minute Apgar score -- a measure of a newborn's health -- of seven or below. Seven is typically an indicator of a healthy baby.

They were also more likely to be admitted to the neonatal intensive care unit, and some of these babies showed signs of withdrawal, such as jitters, seizures, respiratory problems, infections and jaundice.

The team found no differences in the babies' head size or birth weight among the three groups.

Antidepressants used by women in the study included Pfizer Inc's Zoloft, known generically as sertraline; Forest Laboratories Inc's Celexa, or citalopram, and Lexapro, or escitalopram; Eli Lilly and Co's Prozac or fluoxetine; and GlaxoSmithKline's Paxil or paroxetine.

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Neglecting Asthma Treatment During Pregnancy Increases Risk of Asthma in Child

Expectant mothers who eschew asthma treatment during pregnancy heighten the risk transmitting the condition to their offspring, according to one of the largest studies of its kind published in the European Respiratory Journal.

A research team from the Université de Montréal, the Hôpital du Sacré-Cœur de Montréal and Sainte-Justine University Hospital Research Center found that 32.6 percent of children born to mothers who neglected to treat their asthma during pregnancy developed the respiratory illness themselves.

"Uncontrolled maternal asthma during pregnancy could trigger a transient yet important reaction in the fetus that affects lung development and could subsequently increase the likelihood of a baby developing asthma in later childhood," warns lead author Dr. Lucie Blais, a professor at the Université de Montréal's Faculty of Pharmacy and researcher at the Hôpital du Sacré-Cœur de Montréal.

As part of the study, the research team examined a decade of health records for 8,226 children – from birth to 10 years of age – born to asthmatic mothers. Parents of these children were also mailed questionnaires requesting additional facts concerning familial medical history, lifestyle habits and environment.

"We found that failing to control maternal asthma during pregnancy clearly has an impact on asthma in offspring – a consequence that is independent of other contributing factors," says Dr. Blais. "It is of great importance for physicians to adequately treat asthmatic mothers during pregnancy, not only for the favourable outcome of pregnancy but also for the benefit of the child."

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Solvent used in Cape Cod pipes linked to birth defects

A new study published in an environmental health journal says babies born to Cape Cod women exposed in pregnancy to a chemical solvent in drinking water had an increased risk of birth defects.

A mother's exposure to PCE, also known as perchlorethylene, increased by threefold the risk a baby would have cleft palate or a neural tube defect, said lead researcher Ann Aschengrau, an epidemiologist at the Boston University School of Public Health.

She worked with a team of researchers to study women from eight Cape towns who had been exposed to PCE in the vinyl lining of water pipes from 1969 to 1983.

Evidence is mounting that PCE, a solvent often used in dry cleaning, has an impact on fetal development, Aschengrau said. "Pregnant women are a vulnerable population. We really need to find out the effects of these chemicals among them."

Water contamination typically results from industrial disposal, but in the 1960s water pipes in several towns on the Cape and elsewhere in Massachusetts were purposely sprayed with vinyl plastic and PCE to improve the taste of drinking water, Aschengrau said.

Manufacturers wrongly assumed the PCE would disappear during the drying process, but large amounts remained and slowly leached into drinking water in Barnstable, Bourne, Falmouth, Mashpee, Sandwich, Provincetown, Brewster and Chatham, she said.

Aschengrau's study is important because it is able to single out PCE exposure as a risk factor, said Julia Brody, executive director of the Silent Spring Institute in Newton, which researches environmental links to breast cancer.

Once the PCE contamination was detected, authorities cleared the pipes through a flushing process, saying replacing hundreds of miles of vinyl-coated pipe would be too expensive, Aschengrau said.

For her five-year study, researchers got records of where the coated pipe had been installed and used birth certificate records to track down women who'd used those water supplies during their pregnancies in a 15-year time period.

Cleft palate and neural tube defects were the only birth defects that stood out among the babies who had been exposed in the womb to PCE.

The number of children with these defects was small — 17, including those exposed and unexposed to PCE. Aschengrau said she'd like to do a follow-up study of PCE water pipe exposure across Massachusetts in order to obtain a bigger sample size.

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Pregnant Heidi Klum on Ellen

For your Monday pleasure, here is a very pregnant Heidi Klum on Ellen (guaranteed to make you laugh):

How to Make Sure Your Baby Equipment is Safe

The United States Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) protects the public from serious risk, injury or death posed by consumer products. Here are several of their suggestions for purchasing safe baby equipment and products:

• Baby Strollers or Carriages: should have a wide base to prevent tipping and the stroller's breaks should securely lock the wheels. If you're transforming the stroller into a carriage, make sure leg openings can close to prevent your baby from falling out. Make sure the stroller's shopping basket is directly over or in front of the rear wheels to ensure stability.
• Toys: you should have a meticulous eye for any strings that might get wrapped around your baby's neck or detachable pieces he or she can choke on. Rattles should also be sturdy enough to withstand being dropped or struck so they do not break. Toys should not be left with your baby while he or she is sleeping.
• Cradles: must have a sturdy bottom and wide base for stability. The cradle should have smooth surfaces, free of protruding staples or other hardware that can injure your baby. The cradle should also have strong legs and locks to prevent it from folding while your baby is inside. The CPSC also suggests using a firm mattress that fits snugly inside the cradle.
• Car Seats: automobile crashes are the leading cause of death for children in the United States and installing your car seat properly is crucial. Read the directions and practice installing your car seat before your baby arrives. Also refer to your car's owner's manual to see if any other guidelines are provided. Make sure your car seat appropriate for your baby's weight and height.

For more information about product safety, visit the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission Website or call them at 800-683-2772.

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Halloween Costumes for Pregnant Women

If you happen to look for a maternity Halloween costume this year, you will inevitably run into the same costumes over and over again: pirate, devil, fairy, angel, nun, etc. It looks like costume companies haven't gotten very creative with the unique body shape that pregnancy brings. Luckily, creative folks have taken things in their own hands. Here are some Halloween costume ideas for you:

Are Haunted Houses Safe While Pregnant?

Are haunted houses safe while pregnant? It depends.

If the haunted house is one for children, meaning something extremely mild in the scare factor, then it should be fine. But the later you are in your pregnancy paired with the intensity of a professional haunted house could be cause for concern.

Aside from being frightened, raising your blood pressure, along with your baby's, and the anxiety and distress that could cause pre-term labor, there are other factors to consider (as if that wasn't enough):

• The darkness and tripping over something you cannot see. (I know my balance is certainly off.)
• Loud startling noises can also affect the baby.
• Smoke or fog machines are not healthy to breathe in.
• They are often crowded and people push and shove -- could be dangerous.

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Stay-At-Home Moms: Who They Really Are and How They Rate Themselves

More stay-at-home mothers give themselves better marks as parents than do mothers who work outside the home, according to an analysis released Thursday.

The analysis, by the Pew Research Center, is based on several of their telephone polls, the most recent of which was conducted this summer and included 1,815 people 16 and older. It found that among the at-home mothers, 43 percent rated themselves 9 or 10, at the top of the scale, while 33 percent of working mothers did so.

“In perhaps the most powerful evidence of the cross-pressures that many working mothers feel every day,” the study said, “only 13 percent of moms who work full time say having a mother who works full time is the ideal situation for a young child.”

The Pew study,along with a new Census Bureau analysis also released Thursday, provides fresh details on the nation’s 5.6 million stay-at-home mothers. The bureau’s analysis, which considered census data from 2007, found that mothers who do not work outside the home are likely to be younger, Hispanic or foreign-born.

For example, the study found that 44 percent of stay-at-home mothers are under age 35, while only 38 percent of mothers in the labor force are under 35. It also found that 27 percent of stay-at-home mothers are Hispanic and 34 percent are foreign born, while 16 percent of mothers working outside the home are Hispanic and 19 percent are foreign born.

Women without a job outside the home are more likely to have an infant in the household and have less than a high school degree, the bureau found.

“It makes sense that the stay-at-homes are younger, as young people are more likely to be in school,” said Guillermina Jasso, a sociology professor at New York University.

The bureau’s analysis is part of its study on “America’s Families and Living Arrangements.” Officials say it is the agency’s first look at who the nation’s stay-at-home mothers are.

The Pew study found that 3 out of 10 stay-at-home mothers say family responsibilities keep them out of the labor force. While two-thirds of women with children 16 or younger work full time outside the home, most say they would prefer to work part time, the Pew study said.

The Pew study also found that in 66 percent of married couples with children under 18, both spouses were in the labor force.

The census data also revealed that the nation’s 5.6 million stay-at-home moms represent 24 percent of all married couples with children under 15.

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Will Ferrel Expecting his Third Son!

According to his rep., former Saturday Night Live star Will Ferrell(42) and his wife, auctioneer Viveca Paulin(40), have a 3rd son on the way!

Their sons, Mangus (5 1/2) and Mattias (2 1/2), will be meeting their little brother in January.

The couple met in acting class in 1995. Will Ferrell was recently nominated for a Tony for his famous George W. Bush impersonation that was featured in his Broadway show.

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Heart Disease Link to Prenatal Flu Exposure: Study

Children of women infected with influenza during pregnancy have a substantially higher risk of heart disease late in life, according to a study published on Wednesday.

The findings underscore the danger facing pregnant women from the H1N1 swine flu virus, or any other strain of flu, and also demonstrate that what happens in the womb can affect a person decades later.

Caleb Finch of the University of Southern California and colleagues studied records from the 1918 flu pandemic and found that boys whose mothers were infected during the second or third trimester of pregnancy with them had a 23 percent greater chance of having heart disease after age 60 than boys whose mothers were not infected.

Girls exposed in the second or third trimesters were not at greater risk for cardiovascular problems. But girls infected during the first trimester were 17 percent more likely than the general population have heart disease later in life.

Boys whose mothers had flu while pregnant were also more likely to be slightly shorter than their peers, Finch's team reported in the Journal of Developmental Origins of Health and Disease.

The researchers examined records of more than 100,000 people born around the time of the 1918 flu outbreak in the United States. They also examined the height of 2.7 million men born between 1915 and 1922, using military enrollment records from World War II.

Results showed that average height increased every successive year except for the period coinciding with fetal exposure to the flu pandemic.

"The 1918 flu was far more lethal than any since. Nonetheless, there is particular concern for the current swine flu, which seems to target pregnant women," Finch said.

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Surgery During Pregnancy May Treat Heart Defects

Infants born with a rare heart defect may have better outcomes when surgery to repair the heart is done while the infant is still in the womb, Harvard University researchers say.

The condition, hypoplastic left heart syndrome, occurs when the fetus's left ventricle is underdeveloped and the heart cannot pump enough blood to sustain life. It affects about 1 in 10,000 newborns, and without open-heart surgery within a week of birth, these infants face death. Even with the heart repair, the children lead restricted lives and need at least one heart transplant, researchers say.

"Using the new procedure, in about 30 percent of the fetuses [with technically successful operations], there was an outcome of a two-ventricle circulation after birth," said Dr. Doff B. McElhinney, an assistant professor of pediatrics at Harvard Medical School and an associate in cardiology at Children's Hospital Boston.

How well the infants in the study will fare over the long term isn't known, but the researchers intend to follow them as they grow up, McElhinney said.

In fetuses, aortic stenosis usually progresses to hypoplastic left heart syndrome, the study explains. Prenatal intervention could reduce the total number of surgeries required over a lifetime, eliminate the need for a heart transplant and possibly improve the children's quality of life, he said.

According to the study, 51 of 68 procedures were considered technically successful, and 17 infants (33 percent of the 51) were born with a fully functioning heart.

The operation involves threading a catheter through the mother's abdomen into the fetus's heart. A balloon at the end of the catheter enlarges the aortic valve that controls blood flow from the left ventricle into the aorta and then into the body, McElhinney explained.

The window for performing the procedure is narrow -- at around 20 to 21 weeks of pregnancy, McElhinney said. With time, experience and better technology, the success rate will get better, he added.

"By no means is this revolutionizing the care for all fetuses with hypoplastic left heart syndrome," he said. "It's applicable only in a small subset of those with this disease, and it's working in a relatively small percentage of those in whom we attempt it," he said. And even infants who had a successful procedure needed additional procedures after birth, he noted.

Still, while not a "ringing success," he said it reinforces the belief that prenatal intervention can be used to change the development of serious forms of heart disease.

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Smoking in pregnancy risks psychotic children

Mothers who smoke during pregnancy put their children at greater risk of developing psychotic symptoms as teenagers, British scientists said on Thursday.

Researchers from four British universities studied 6,356 12-year-olds and interviewed them for psychotic-like symptoms such as hallucinations or delusions. Around 19 percent had mothers who smoked during pregnancy.

Just over 11 percent, or 734 of the total group, had suspected or definite symptoms of psychosis.

Many previous studies have shown cigarettes can harm the fetuses of mothers who smoke while pregnant. The risks include causing babies to be born smaller and increasing the risk of sudden infant death syndrome or heart defects.

Stanley Zammit, a psychiatrist at Cardiff University's School of Medicine who led the study, said the more the mothers smoked, the more likely their children were to have psychotic symptoms.

"We can estimate that about 20 percent of adolescents in this cohort would not have developed psychotic symptoms if their mothers had not smoked," he said.

Despite countless studies flagging up the risks to babies, it is estimated that between 15 and 20 percent of women in Britain smoke during pregnancy.

The researchers also found drinking during pregnancy was associated with increased psychotic symptoms, but only in children whose mothers had drunk more than 21 units of alcohol a week in early pregnancy.

The reasons for the link between maternal smoking and psychotic symptoms are not clear, but Zammit and colleagues suggested that exposure to tobacco in the womb might affect a child's impulsivity, attention or cognition.

Only a few mothers in the study, which was published in the British Journal of Psychiatry, said they had smoked cannabis during pregnancy, and this was not found to have any significant link with psychotic symptoms.

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