Claim OwnershipMaking Sense of Pregnancy: What Experts Want you To Know About Your Body
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© 2026 Making Sense of Pregnancy: What Experts Want you To Know About Your Body
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Have you been surprised by what we do and don't know about pregnancy and birth today? If you are pregnant, or have been in the past, this show helps you understand what's happening (or has happened) to our bodies--both the short term and long term effects of this transformation. We explore the boundaries of our scientific grasp on the wildly complex processes of pregnancy and birth.
After my complicated pregnancies, I went looking for answers and have interviewed hundreds of experts about women's health in this transition.
Every Tuesday you'll hear:
- Scientists at the cutting edge who are trying to uncover how pregnancy and birth work and what happens when they don't work
- Information you could use to better understand your own body in pregnancy
- .A better sense of the limits of your responsibility for what's happening inside your body
- Listen to hear what you won't find on a blogpost or a book off the shelf.
59 Episodes
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This week's episode is a bit of a prequel focused on the making of the egg, which will make the embryo. Sorry guys. The sperm is an NPC in this one. Why do we care? Because we might not even think about how eggs are made. Until circumstances require it often in the form of a miscarriage, miscarriage rates on average are pretty high. Something like one in four suspected, and that's just of the embryos that actually get implanted. An estimated 60% of embryos never make it past. Th...
When it comes to categorizing pregnant women as high or low risk, we leave so much information on the table--which keeps us limited to the model where doctors use broad averages to triage care for pregnant women. Age is a definitive way to categorize pregnant women. On average a woman who is 35 or older is considered of advanced maternal age and may be watched more carefully throughout the pregnancy. But the number 35 is no magic line crossed; If you have encountered gestational hyperte...
In today's episode, I'll share some research conducted by doctors in Singapore that gives you a sense of how close we are to using non invasive scans to predict conditions in pregnancy and fertility before clinical symptoms arise. What these research physicians are doing is making use of a retinal scan--taking pictures of the tiny vessels at the back of your eye and measuring changes in these vessels to predict a number of significant issues in fertility and pregnancy. Through the...
Pregnant women live two lives simultaneously. They're going about their days, driving to work, or sitting down for coffee with a friend, essentially living the lives they were in before they got pregnant. But now, at the same time, they could be doing it while also growing another human, laying down a brain stem, or working on a fetal heart. All these developmental things are going on, and you don't have direct control over them. In my pregnancies, I felt the weight of resp...
You may not have given much thought to the lining of your uterus, aka your endometrium; but it is a super important workhorse when it comes to pregnancy, and one that, it turns out, has a voice. The old story used to be that the endometrium is this passive, patient group of cells waiting to give any embryo it glimpsed a warm, safe harbor to grow. Today's guest shares the updated story: the endometrium as selective screener, interviewing the embryo--by assessing its chemical signals-- acceptin...
This week's episode is a continuation of my conversation about developing our skills to best use the placenta as a diary of intrauterine life. Dr. Parast shares more of her work about the promise of placental pathology to better understand both the pregnancy that has been completed and potentially to better predict what a future pregnancy could hold. We also talk about: * how to prepare your body for pregnancy * what biomarkers in conjunction with new screening methods can...
The placenta is the diary of intrauterine life, so says Dr. Parast and her collegues. They are using this diary, after birth, to better understand both the trajectory of problems in birth (like IUGR and preeclampsia) as well as markers of impending morbidity for mothers (like autoimmune conditions that have not yet crossed the threshold of noticeable symptoms). Dr. Parast believes that placental pathology should be the standard of care in any birth that involved some sort of pregnancy complic...
Here we are in the 21st century and we're just figuring out how uterine contractions work. Humans have giving birth for millions of years and we are only now unpacking part of the uterine contribution to this magic trick. For years scientists used a rodent model to interrogate how uterine contractions work, which turned out to be the wrong model; scientists used the heart as a model organ to try to elucidate how electricity moves in the uterus and makes it contract, but that too, was the ...
Although postpartum depression is the most common side effect of pregnancy–roughly 1 in 6 women will experience a less often studied condition that may be equally common-- post delivery post traumatic stress disorder. Dr. Sharon Dekel, PhD is a leading researcher in the developing field of childbirth related PTSD. Her lab is focused on understanding, diagnosing and treating this regrettably common mental health challeng, and disentangling CB-PTSD from PPD. Diagnosis can be diffi...
The brain fog and forgetfulness that may accompany pregnancy and postpartum is almost always described negatively as "mommy brain"--but this phenomenal brain plasticity needs a rebrand. What's actually happening is that the brain, like almost every other organ in the body, is adapting to the dramatic state of pregnancy. Some changes are transitory in the brain, as they are in the body. Some are more permanent. Going forward, let's be impressed by our ability to neurologically prepare for ...
I am both hopeful and moved, AND filled with disbelief after my conversation with today's guest. He is an OB who has done an inordinate amount of work to make birth safer first for Californians, then for women across the country. His work, which you'll hear about and be able to use in your own pregnancy, is inspiring. What I can't get my head around is the state of maternity care he set out to change in 2006, some of which remains unchanged. Does it make sense that you don...
One of the first things on an embryo's to-do list is to make a placenta, but to do this, it will need to work well with the decidual cells occupying the future Placenta construction site, otherwise known as the decidua or uterine lining that's beefed up for pregnancy. There are likely many contributors to this process, but how this negotiation goes down between a specific set of immune cells called uterine natural killer cells, or uNK cells and the fetal cells from the embryo that set ...
Although your OB usually doesn’t want to see you in the early weeks of pregnancy—there’s a lot going on that is of critical importance to the ease or complications of a pregnancy—specifically , the introduction of fetus to your uterine lining, and the subsequent merging, if implantation happens. The weeks that follow are equally consequential. Exactly how those cells of your uterine lining negotiate the migration of trophoblast cells, fetal cells that are building the placenta can be th...
We are going to talk about the menstrual cycle, aka the result of the conversation between your brain, pituitary and ovaries that’s going on each months to create the conditions for you to build a human. How does your body accomplish this amazing feat? You likely experience your menstrual cycle, and your period in particular, as an inconvenience, but evolution put a lot of hard work into this process and it turns out to be pretty nifty. We’ll also talk about the why today. M...
Current statistics suggest that postpartum depression is one of the most common complications of pregnancy in the US, estimated at between 1 in 10 and 1 and 5 women--and this estimate is mostly based on the response to survey responses. The Edinburgh Postnatal Depression Scale (EPDS) is the most widely used screening tool for postpartum depression (PPD), recommended by ACOG, USPSTF, and PSI for universal screening at the 1-12 week postpartum visit, and is an imperfect tool to catc...
The very first construction project in pregnancy is the placenta. It's critical to the embryo's development, and problems with the placenta can have significant consequences for the baby. Since doctors have been able to identify fetal growth restriction in the course of pregnancy--which started in about the 1970s-- the medical response has been to prescribe bedrest and or early delivery. In the second half of my conversation with Dr. Helen Jones, we talk about how this response to fetal gro...
If you're listening to this episode on placental gene therapy, you may wanna sit down. Today's guest walks us through a gene therapy that (a) doesn't change the chromosomal DNA of the mother or the fetus; that (b) can reverse (you heard that right)--REVERSE placental insufficiency after it has taken hold, and as if that weren't enough, (c) has successfully restored fetal weight in growth, restricted Guinea pigs, passed safety checks in macaques and maybe in clinics as soon as five year...
Many headlines exclaim the wonders of AI and medical research. What better place to leverage the advantages of AI than in research about pregnancy that positively impacts everyone's health, both in the present and the future? And by that I mean the mother and the baby during the pregnancy and the baby's health trajectory into the future--and maybe also the mothers as well. Today's guests are an uncommon duo, a computer scientist, and an OB who are using big data algorithms and cli...
Never before in the history of humanity have we been able to examine a pregnancy in process and predict the risk of conditions before clinical symptoms have developed. Even 10 years ago, if you told an OB that you could reliably predict which pregnant women were most likely to encounter preterm birth in their first pregnancy, you'd likely be written off as a kook. The power to predict complications in pregnancy, premature birth, postpartum depression, and other postpartum states is a marker ...
Looking through some of the research I highlighted on the podcast this year gives me a real sense of hope about the future of pregnancy, and I hope it does for you too. There's good news and bad news. Let's get the bad news outta the way first. It's true that women's health has gotten the short end of the stick in terms of federal funding and research interest for far too long, and research on pregnant women has gotten an even shorter version of that stick. It's still considered niche ...
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