A Little More About Your Body

 I had wrote a blog earlier about getting to know your body (here), I hope it sparked a little curiosity in some of you which lead to your own research. I did not want to go too in depth with that blog, mainly just a starting point to jump from for yourself. I want to write now about how you can pin point conception and why it is important in today's health care for you and your future child.
 First let me raise your awareness about the horrid rates of inductions in America. Roughly 1 out of every 3 women have their labor induced, most for very unnecessary reasons big baby, being post dates, doctors convenience, mothers convenience.. Most of these inductions are around 40 weeks when a woman is "term" and surprisingly horrible is that doctors induce women before the baby is even "term". What does this mean exactly? Well having an induction is an almost guarantee that intervention after intervention will be used. Pitocin is sure to be used I will not get into the effects of pit labor right now and some studies say that your chances for a c-section increase by 50% or more. Nobody wants some major surgery, ever. If you do then stop reading my blog and find a shrink please.
 Let me talk about one major thing with inductions before 40 weeks of pregnancy, they can bring out pre-term newborns. A pre-term newborn is not a pre-mature baby but still faces a lot of the same complications and some of their own as a premature baby would. A pre-term newborn is born between 35-37/8 weeks of pregnancy. They can be born with immature lungs, inability to regular body temperature, low blood sugars, poor suckle reflex, they have higher rates of infantile reflux. A pre-term newborn can spend time, and very costly time, in the NICU for these things. When they do come home they have higher chances of contracting RSV, flu, ear infections and a few other things. So who wants a pre-term newborn?... if you said yes then please again stop reading and find a shrink. Even with all of those things pre-term newborns are being born every single day, why? Well because doctors induce women on their  due dates or sooner without knowing exactly when conception happened. They use their best guesses like basing it on your last period, and if you have some pretty wacky cycles that guess can be way way off...like 2 weeks or longer. So just think you are 40 weeks and doctor Mc Stabby Hands wants to induce but your cycles were longer than whatever normal is and so really your baby can be like 38 weeks, now imagine the same doctor doesn't "let" women go to their due dates and wants to induce around 38.5 weeks..so now the baby is what 36 weeks? ..... well now you have a pre-term infant on hand. While most pre-term babies are fine (sorry not percent here couldn't find one) some do not do alright and that is a chance I DO NOT wish to take.

 Ok so here is my education, if you can pin point conception by charting your daily waking basal body temperature as described in the book Taking Charge of Your Fertility then you will know when to accept an induction if that is the path you so should choose. You will be able to know exactly how far you are and how developed your baby is and when it should be safe for them to come into the world if you choose not to let nature be. Charting is easy actually, it is just something that becomes a part of your morning wake up. The alarm (or in my case crazy energetic 3 yr old) goes off you pop the thermometer in your mouth, it beeps, you write it down. Some women then take the temps and chart them to see when the thermo shift happens when ovulation occurs. When you are able to pin-point this you know exactly how far along you are when you become pregnant, and education is your best weapon against unwanted inductions! Seriously, think about it!!