Loss Of A Fetus Quotes

So many things are lost in the dark. A slight misstep and we lose our footing. A quick hand in a pocket and we lose our money. A coat hanger in a womb and we lose a fetus. A swift puncture and we lose a life.

Ketosis may actually be beneficial for moms as well. A high percentage of women with gestational diabetes are overweight at conception or have exceeded their weight gain goals established by their doctor. These women have increased fat stores that can supply energy for the growing fetus and do not necessarily benefit from continued weight gain. Some studies actually found no weight gain or modest weight loss during pregnancy can improve outcomes in obese women.[147]

And as we’ve mentioned, one of the most powerful tools we use to help regulate a distressed infant is rhythm. Oprah: Why is that? Dr. Perry: All life is rhythmic. The rhythms of the natural world are embedded in our biological systems. This begins in the womb, when the mother’s beating heart creates rhythmic sound, pressure, and vibrations that are sensed by the developing fetus and provide constant rhythmic input to the organizing brain. These experiences create powerful associations—essentially, memories—that connect rhythms of roughly sixty to eighty beats per minute (bpm) to regulation. Sixty to eighty bpm is the average resting heart rate for an adult; it’s the rhythm the fetus sensed, and it equates to being in balance, to being warm, full, quenched, safe. After birth, rhythms at these frequencies can comfort and soothe, whereas the loss of rhythm, or high, variable, and unpredictable patterns of sensory input, becomes associated with threat.

The notion that the womb is a silent place is pure fantasy. If a person dives under water, he hears very little because sound is muffled by the cushion of air remaining outside the eardrum. A fetus has no air bubble outside its ear, and water conducts sound better than air.

Scientists know that the majority of pregnancy losses are caused by aneuploidy- chromosomal abnormalities that, for reasons we don't totally understand, result in forms of life that are incapable of being carried to term.

Early pregnancy loss is important for our species. As many as 70% of human conceptions may never develop, and a third of recognized pregnancies terminate spontaneously through miscarriage. This extraordinary reproductive inefficiency has a compelling purpose: increasing the likelihood that fetuses surviving the natural winnowing of pregnancy are normal and healthy.14 This miscarriage screening process works well,15,16 and nearly all newborns are healthy as a result. From a biological perspective, induced abortion is an extension of miscarriage—a continued winnowing designed to ensure than children are well born….healthy, wanted, and loved.

I was sitting up in my drab gown when the doctor returned to the room with the kind of solemn look that you never want to see on your doctor’s face. There was nothing further to be done. The fetus would not survive. I felt like I was losing a part of my soul. I had let myself believe another beautiful child was on the way, but I was wrong. Steve held me close. Not only were we experiencing an unspeakable sense of loss, but with more anguish than I could imagine, I had to abort my pregnancy out of medical necessity. The crushing procedure, throughout which I was again sobbing, required dilating the cervix in order to extract the fetus. Ignorant or vindictive opponents have attacked that procedure—one of the great tragedies of my life—as a “partial-birth abortion.

Then in 1999 researchers began studying the population records of the women who were in their last trimester of pregnancy during the Dutch Famine. Their children were more obese and had higher rates of diabetes and heart disease compared to children who were born either before or after the Dutch Famine. It became apparent that the calorie restriction experienced by their mothers more than fifty years earlier had resulted in negative health consequences for their children in the womb. Scientists call this fetal programming. It is especially powerful in the last trimester of pregnancy when the mother’s diet greatly influences the epigenetic changes to the fetal DNA to prepare them for what their new environment will be outside the womb. During the Dutch Famine there was a complete mismatch of the mother’s diet during their pregnancy relative to what the dietary environment their child would experience after their birth. The result was these children had an altered metabolism—one that was suited to famine conditions, rather than abundance. This epigenetic mismatch resulted in increased incidence of obesity, diabetes, and heart disease. The fact that all these conditions (obesity, diabetes, and heart disease) are linked by increased diet-induced inflammation suggests that some of those epigenetic changes taking place during the Dutch Famine may also have turned on selected genes that resulted in enhanced diet-induced inflammation once adequate food was available. This is because the fetus was programmed in the womb for highly restricted calorie intake conditions, which was totally mismatched for abundance of calories available after the birth.