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).<\/p>\n
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<\/a><\/em>, “Pregnancy seemed to be treated as a one-size-fits-all affair. The way I was used to making decisions \u2013 thinking about my personal preferences, combined with the data \u2013 was barely used at all.” <\/p>\n 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<\/a><\/em>, 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 \u2013 a list that looks very different from most pregnancy sources. <\/p>\n 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. <\/p>\n This framework, and the specific data in each book, are empowering tools for decision-making in pregnancy and beyond.<\/p>\n