Two Books About Pregnancy
Statistics-based pregnancy guides
Pregnancy is like home renovation: suddenly you have to make a multitude of decisions about things you never thought about before, on very short notice. You quickly learn that there are a lot of rules about what you can eat, drink, and do while pregnant, as well as highly polarized opinions on how labor and birth should be managed (specifically, natural vs. medicalized birth).
Everyone wants to tell you what the rules are (your doctor, your pregnancy app, friends, strangers), each source offers different rules, and almost none have citations. As economist Emily Oster writes in Expecting Better, “Pregnancy seemed to be treated as a one-size-fits-all affair. The way I was used to making decisions – thinking about my personal preferences, combined with the data – was barely used at all.”
So Ostler focuses on applying the economist’s decision-making toolkit to timing conception, the pros and cons of prenatal testing, and choosing whether or not to get an epidural. In Debunking the Bump, Adler uses her statistical skills to bust pervasive pregnancy myths. For example, she contradicts the oft-cited twice-a-week limit on seafood consumption with strong evidence in favor of eating fish (including sushi) daily to support fetal brain development. She points out that in the long list of forbidden foods, one category is 10,000 times riskier than all the others. She mines the data to create a short list of the most important things the research can tell us about prenatal health – a list that looks very different from most pregnancy sources.
Both authors consider the research on common pregnancy decisions, and discover that delving into the data generally calms common fears. Both offer bullet point summaries of their conclusions on each topic. I didn’t agree with everything they wrote, yet neither expects you to accept their conclusions as gospel: both offer extensive citations, and the larger message is that each person will weigh the pros and cons in the context of their own lives and preferences.
This framework, and the specific data in each book, are empowering tools for decision-making in pregnancy and beyond.
Expecting Better: Why the conventional Pregnancy Wisdom Is Wrong – What You Really Need to Know
by Emily Oster
$12, 2014, 336 pages
Debunking the Bump: A mathematician Mom explodes myths about pregnancy
by Daphne Adler
$15, 2014, 368 pages
Excerpt
EXCERPTS:
In contrast, plenty of studies have found no appreciable effect from small amounts of alcohol. For example, one study of 665 women women in Australia found that moderate drinking had no effect on measurements of newborns at birth, while another Australian study followed the children of 2,900 women for 14 years and found no link between low and moderate levels of alcohol consumption and pregnancy and later behavior in children. A study in Scotland concluded that drinking fewer than ~3 drinks per week appeared to have no effect on mental and motor development at 18 months of age. And a series of studies in Denmark found that low to moderate drinking in early pregnancy had no significant effect on developmental outcomes in children. - Debunking the Bump
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Imagine that I told you there are two families. In one family the 1-year-old watches four hours of television per day, and in the other the 1-year-old watches none. Now I want you to tell me whether you think these families are similar. You probably don’t think so, and you’d be right.
On average, the kinds of parents who forbid television tend to have more education, be older, read more books, and on and on. So is it really the television that matters? Or is it all these other differences?
This is the difference between correlation and causation. Television and test scores are correlated, there is no question. This means that when you see a child who watches a lot of TV, on average you expect him to have lower test scores. But that is not causation. - Expecting Better
