Short Pregnancy Quotes

It surprises me, though it shouldn't, how short the memories of these politicians are. They forget the brutal lengths women have gone to in order to terminate pregnancies when abortion was illegal or when abortion is unaffordable. Women have thrown themselves down stairs and otherwise tried to physically harm themselves to force a miscarriage. Dr. Waldo Fielding noted in the New York Times, "Almost any implement you can imagine had been and was used to start an abortion—darning needles, crochet hooks, cut-glass salt shakers, soda bottles, sometimes intact, sometimes with the top broken off." Women have tried to use soap and bleach, catheters, natural remedies. Women have historically resorted to any means necessary. Women will do this again if we are backed into that terrible corner. This is the responsibility our society has forced on women for hundreds of years.

If I were Satan and wanted to destroy a society, I think I would stage a full blown blitz on its women. I would keep them so distraught and distracted that they would never find the calming strength and serenity for which their sex has always been known. He has effectively done that, catching us in the crunch of trying to be superhuman instead of realistically striving to reach our indiviual purpose and unique God-given potential within such diversity. He tauntingly teases us that if we don't have it all- fame, fortune, families, and fun- and have it every minute all the time, we have been short changed; we are second class citizens in the race of life. You'd have to be deaf, dumb and blind not to get these messages in today's world, and as a sex we are struggling, and our society struggles. Drugs, teenage pregnancies, divorce, family violence, and suicide are some of the every-increasing side effecs of our collective life in the express lane.

Now in my eleven years of conventional life I had learned many things and one of them is what it means to be convicted of rape--I do not mean the man who did it, I mean the woman to whom it was done. Rape is one of the Christian mysteries, it creates a luminous and beautiful tableau in people's minds; and as I listened furtively to what nobody would allow me to hear straight out, I slowly came to understand that I was face to face with one of those feminine disasters, like pregnancy, like disease, like weakness; she was not only the victim of the act but in some strange way its perpetrator; somehow she had attracted the lightening that struck her out of a clear sky. A diabolical chance--which was not chance--had revealed her to all of us as she truly was, in her secret inadequacy, in that wretched guiltiness which she had kept hidden for seventeen years but which now finally manifested in front of everybody. Her secret guilt was this: She was Cunt. She had "lost" something. Now the other party to the incident had manifested his essential nature, too; he was Prick--but being Prick is not a bad thing. In fact, he had "gotten away with" something (possibly what she had "lost"). And there I was at eleven years of age: She was out late at night. She was in the wrong part of town. Her skirt was too short and that provoked him. She liked having her eye blacked and her head banged against the sidewalk. I understood this perfectly. (I reflected thus in my dream, in my state of being a pair of eyes in a small wooden box stuck forever on a grey, geometric plane--or so I thought.) I too had been guilty of what had been done to me, when I came home from the playground in tears because I had been beaten up by bigger children who were bullies. I was dirty. I was crying. I demanded comfort. I was being inconvenient. I did not disappear into thin air.

It is not ordinary to conceive a life and then to loose it. It's very far from ordinary. These passing's should be marked, should be respected, should be given their due. It's a life, however small, however germinal. It's a collection of cells, from you and in most cases, from someone you love. Yes, of course worse things happen every day, no one in their right mind would deny that. But to dismiss a miscarriage as nothing, as something you need to take on the chin and carry on, is to do a disservice to ourselves, to our living children, to those nascent beings that lived only within us, to the person we imagined throughout the short pregnancy, to those ghost children we still carry in our minds, The ones who didn't make it.

It took two continents, a regressive family, a forced marriage marred with abuse, a bitter divorce, an illegitimate pregnancy, family disownment, social ostracisation, going back to school - unlearning, learning and relearning, and a complete owning of her true self.

Molar pregnancies like Janet’s are indeed rare, but they do happen. Over the last decade, frustrated and worried women have emailed me, asking why their doctors won’t pay attention to their symptoms, telling them to just “wait it out.” I think this happens because obstetricians see so many situations, and most of the time, it works out the way they expect—the recovery may be short, medium, or long, but will not require intervention. But statistics like one in five hundred are meaningless if you are the one. I always tell women who can’t get through to their doctors to start looking for one whose office responsiveness matches her needs. Not every doctor and every patient are going to be a good fit.

Hungry?” he asks. “The wager?” I remind him. “I’m getting there—it’s related to my question.” He lifts his chin to the meat locker. “They have good steaks here.” And just like that, I’m interested in whatever he’s suggesting. “They do. What’re you thinking?” “They have a porterhouse for two, three, or four.” I haven’t eaten in nearly twenty-four hours, and the idea of a big juicy steak has me salivating. “Yeah?” “So, I say we split the one for three, and whoever eats more wins.” “I’m going to guess their porterhouse for three could feed us both for a week.” “I’m betting you’re right.” His adorable grin should be accompanied by the sound of a silvery ding. “And your dinner is on me.” For not the first time, it occurs to me to ask him how he makes ends meet, but I can’t—not here, and maybe not when we’re alone, either. “You don’t have to do that.” “I think I can handle treating my wife to dinner on our wedding night.” Our wedding night. My heart thuds heavily. “That’s a lot of meat. No pun intended.” He grins enthusiastically. “I’d sure like to see how you handle it.” “You’re betting Holland can’t finish a steak?” Lulu chimes in from behind me. “Oh, you sweet summer child.” *** As we get up, I groan, clutching my stomach. “Is this what pregnancy feels like? Not interested.” “I could carry you,” Calvin offers sweetly, helping me with my coat. Lulu pushes between us, giddy from wine as she throws her arms around our shoulders. “You’re supposed to carry the bride across the threshold to be romantic, not because she’s broken from eating her weight in beef.” I stifle a belch. “The way to impress a man is to show him how much meat you can handle, don’t you know this, Lu?” Calvin laughs. “It was a close battle.” “Not that close,” Mark says, beside him. We went so far as to have the waiter split the cooked steak into two equal portions, much to the amused fascination of our tablemates. I ate roughly three-quarters of mine. Calvin was two ounces short. “Calvin Bakker has a pretty solid ring to it,” I say. He laugh-groans. “What did I get myself into?” “A marriage to a farm girl,” I say. “It’s best you learn on day one that I take my eating very seriously.

Go ahead. Ask me who the father is.” He only smiled. “Do I look that stupid to you?” She pushed back her short hair with a sigh. “He doesn’t know, and you’re not to tell him. In English, Apache or Lakota,” she emphasized, covering all her bases. He nodded. “What are you going to do?” “I haven’t the slightest idea,” she confessed. “I only used the home-pregnancy test this morning, but I was pretty sure before then. I’ve got to find a place to live where Leta won’t see me for a while. I can’t risk having her tell Tate.” She glanced at him. “Where were you all this time?” she wanted to know. “Sitting calmly in a wing chair sipping coffee and trying to look invisible.” He lifted his eyebrows at her disbelieving expression. “Somebody had to keep his head.” “There’s an old saying that, if you can keep your head when everyone around you is losing theirs, you don’t have a clue what’s going on,” she misquoted. “Could be. But I’m not sporting a bruised face, like some I could name.” He leaned forward. “Want to marry me?” “Thanks, Colby,” she said softly. “I really mean it. But it wouldn’t be fair to any of us. Especially you.” He folded his arms and leaned back. “The offer doesn’t have a time limit. I really do love children.

Short first pregnancies do not occasion criticism in our valley, for it is widely known that the good Lord often makes first pregnancies mercifully brief as His reward to the girl for having preserved her chastity until marriage. Subsequent pregnancies, however, usually run their full terms, which only makes sense, as the very fact that they are not first pregnancies means that the mother was not chaste at the moment of conception.

Readers acquainted with the recent literature on human sexuality will be familiar with what we call the standard narrative of human sexual evolution, hereafter shortened to the standard narrative. It goes something like this: 1. Boy Meets girl, 2. Boy and girl assess one and others mate value, from perspectives based upon their differing reproductive agendas/capacities. He looks for signs of youth, fertility, health, absence of previous sexual experience and likelihood of future sexual fidelity. In other words, his assessment is skewed toward finding a fertile, healthy young mate with many childbearing years ahead and no current children to drain his resources. She looks for signs of wealth (or at least prospects of future wealth), social status, physical health and likelihood that he will stick around to protect and provide for their children. Her guy must be willing and able to provide materially for her (especially during pregnancy and breastfeeding) and their children, known as "male parental investment". 3. Boy gets girl. Assuming they meet one and others criteria, they mate, forming a long term pair bond, "the fundamental condition of the human species" as famed author Desmond Morris put it. Once the pair bond is formed, she will be sensitive to indications that he is considering leaving, vigilant towards signs of infidelity involving intimacy with other women that would threaten her access to his resources and protection while keeping an eye out (around ovulation especially) for a quick fling with a man genetically superior to her husband. He will be sensitive to signs of her sexual infidelities which would reduce his all important paternity certainty while taking advantage of short term sexual opportunities with other women as his sperm are easily produced and plentiful. Researchers claim to have confirmed these basic patterns in studies conducted around the world over several decades. Their results seem to support the standard narrative of human sexual evolution, which appears to make a lot of sense, but they don't, and it doesn't.

There is a school of thought out there that expects women to get over a miscarriage as if nothing has happened, to metabolise it quickly and get on with life. It’s just like a bad period, a friend of mine was told, briskly, by her mother-in-law. To this, I say: Why? Why should we carry on as if it’s nothing out of the ordinary? It is not ordinary to conceive a life and then to lose it; it’s very far from ordinary. These passings should be marked, should be respected, should be given their due. It’s a life, however small, however germinal. It’s a collection of cells, from you and, in most cases, from someone you love. Yes, of course worse things happen every day; no one in their right mind would deny that. But to dismiss a miscarriage as nothing, as something you need to take on the chin and carry on, is to do a disservice to ourselves, to our living children, to those nascent beings that lived only within us, to the person we imagined throughout the short pregnancy, to those ghost children we still carry in our minds, the ones who didn’t make it.

Can there be true equality in the classroom and the boardroom if there isn’t in the bedroom? Back in 1995 the National Commission on Adolescent Sexual Health declared healthy sexual development a basic human right. Teen intimacy, it said, ought to be “consensual, non-exploitative, honest, pleasurable, and protected against unintended pregnancy and STDs.” How is it, over two decades later, that we are so shamefully short of that goal? Sara McClelland, a professor of psychology at the University of Michigan, writes about sexuality as a matter of “intimate justice,” touching on fundamental issues of gender inequality, economic disparity, violence, bodily integrity, physical and mental health, self-efficacy, and power dynamics in our most personal relationships. She asks us to consider: Who has the right to engage in sexual behavior? Who has the right to enjoy it? Who is the primary beneficiary of the experience? Who feels deserving? How does each partner define “good enough?” Those are thorny questions when looking at female sexuality at any age, but particularly when considering girls’ early, formative experience. Nonetheless, I was determined to ask them.

It seems obvious that throughout history, as one of the few professions open to women, midwifery must have attracted women of unusual intelligence, competence, and self-respect§. While acknowledging that many remedies used by the witches were “purely magical” and worked, if at all, by suggestion, Ehrenreich and English point out an important distinction between the witch-healer and the medical man of the late Middle Ages: . . . the witch was an empiricist; She relied on her senses rather than on faith or doctrine, she believed in trial and error, cause and effect. Her attitude was not religiously passive, but actively inquiring. She trusted her ability to find ways to deal with disease, pregnancy and childbirth—whether through medication or charms. In short, her magic was the science of her time. By contrast: There was nothing in late mediaeval medical training that conflicted with church doctrine, and little that we would recognize as “science”. Medical students . . . spent years studying Plato, Aristotle and Christian theology. . . . While a student, a doctor rarely saw any patients at all, and no experimentation of any kind was taught. . . . Confronted with a sick person, the university-trained physician had little to go on but superstition. . . . Such was the state of medical “science” at the time when witch-healers were persecuted for being practitioners of “magic”.15 Since asepsis and the transmission of disease through bacteria and unwashed hands was utterly unknown until the latter part of the nineteenth century, dirt was a presence in any medical situation—real dirt, not the misogynistic dirt associated by males with the female body. The midwife, who attended only women in labor, carried fewer disease bacteria with her than the physician.

We need a test!" I jump up out of the chair and pat my body down. "Where's my wallet?" "In your pocket," she replies dryly. "I'll be back!" I race out of the house and drive the short distance between Dom's estate and the nearest village. After I find a drug store and buy one of each kind of pregnancy test they have, I race back to my hopefully pregnant wife. "That was fast," she murmurs with a grin. She was still sitting in the lounge chair, sipping her coffee. "Should you be drinking coffee?" I ask. "Let's not get crazy," she responds. I need coffee. "I got one of each kind," I announce and opened the bag, sending small white and blue boxes scattering. "Uh, Caleb, we only need one." "What if we can't figure them out?" I ask and pick one up to examine it. "All of the instructions are in Italian." She laughs hysterically and then stands, wiping her eyes. "It's not funny." "Yes, it is. Pregnancy tests are pretty universal, Caleb. You pee on it and a line either appears or it doesn't." She rubs my arm sweetly and kisses my shoulder before plucking the box out of my fingers. "I'll be back." "I'm coming with you." I begin to follow her but she turns quickly with her hands out to stop me. "Oh no, you aren't. You are not going to watch me pee on this stick." I scowled down at her and cross my arms over my chest. "I've helped you bathe and dress and every other damn thing when you were hurt. I can handle watching you pee." "Absolutely not." She shakes her head but then leans in and kisses my chin. "But thank you for helping me when I was hurt." She turns and runs for the bathroom and it feels like an eternity before she comes back out, white stick in her hand. "Well?" I ask. "It takes about three minutes, babe." She sits in the lounge chair and stares out over the vineyard.

Dear Mother and Dad: Since I left for college I have been remiss in writing and I am sorry for my thoughtlessness in not having written before. I will bring you up to date now, but before you read on, please sit down. You are not to read any further unless you are sitting down, okay? Well, then, I am getting along pretty well now. The skull fracture and the concussion I got when I jumped out the window of my dormitory when it caught on fire shortly after my arrival here is pretty well healed now. I only spent two weeks in the hospital and now I can see almost normally and only get those sick headaches once a day. Fortunately, the fire in the dormitory, and my jump, was witnessed by an attendant at the gas station near the dorm, and he was the one who called the Fire Department and the ambulance. He also visited me in the hospital and since I had nowhere to live because of the burntout dormitory, he was kind enough to invite me to share his apartment with him. It’s really a basement room, but it’s kind of cute. He is a very fine boy and we have fallen deeply in love and are planning to get married. We haven’t got the exact date yet, but it will be before my pregnancy begins to show. Yes, Mother and Dad, I am pregnant. I know how much you are looking forward to being grandparents and I know you will welcome the baby and give it the same love and devotion and tender care you gave me when I was a child. The reason for the delay in our marriage is that my boyfriend has a minor infection which prevents us from passing our pre-marital blood tests and I carelessly caught it from him. Now that I have brought you up to date, I want to tell you that there was no dormitory fire, I did not have a concussion or skull fracture, I was not in the hospital, I am not pregnant, I am not engaged, I am not infected, and there is no boyfriend. However, I am getting a “D” in American History, and an “F” in Chemistry and I want you to see those marks in their proper perspective. Your loving daughter, Sharon Sharon may be failing chemistry, but she gets an “A” in psychology.

READER’S REPORT From the Parent of a College Coed Dear Mother and Dad: Since I left for college I have been remiss in writing and I am sorry for my thoughtlessness in not having written before. I will bring you up to date now, but before you read on, please sit down. You are not to read any further unless you are sitting down, okay? Well, then, I am getting along pretty well now. The skull fracture and the concussion I got when I jumped out the window of my dormitory when it caught on fire shortly after my arrival here is pretty well healed now. I only spent two weeks in the hospital and now I can see almost normally and only get those sick headaches once a day. Fortunately, the fire in the dormitory, and my jump, was witnessed by an attendant at the gas station near the dorm, and he was the one who called the Fire Department and the ambulance. He also visited me in the hospital and since I had nowhere to live because of the burntout dormitory, he was kind enough to invite me to share his apartment with him. It’s really a basement room, but it’s kind of cute. He is a very fine boy and we have fallen deeply in love and are planning to get married. We haven’t got the exact date yet, but it will be before my pregnancy begins to show. Yes, Mother and Dad, I am pregnant. I know how much you are looking forward to being grandparents and I know you will welcome the baby and give it the same love and devotion and tender care you gave me when I was a child. The reason for the delay in our marriage is that my boyfriend has a minor infection which prevents us from passing our pre-marital blood tests and I carelessly caught it from him. Now that I have brought you up to date, I want to tell you that there was no dormitory fire, I did not have a concussion or skull fracture, I was not in the hospital, I am not pregnant, I am not engaged, I am not infected, and there is no boyfriend. However, I am getting a “D” in American History, and an “F” in Chemistry and I want you to see those marks in their proper perspective. Your loving daughter, Sharon Sharon may be failing chemistry, but she gets an “A” in psychology.

On the other hand, some of the family’s impatience with the public is justified. When I use Federal Express, I accept as a condition of business that its standardized forms must be filled out in printed letters. An e-mail address off by a single character goes nowhere. Transposing two digits in a phone number gets me somebody speaking heatedly in Portuguese. Electronic media tell you instantly when you’ve made an error; with the post office, you have to wait. Haven’t we all at some point tested its humanity? I send mail to friends in Upper Molar, New York (they live in Upper Nyack), and expect a stranger to laugh and deliver it in forty-eight hours. More often than not, the stranger does. With its mission of universal service, the Postal Service is like an urban emergency room contractually obligated to accept every sore throat, pregnancy, and demented parent that comes its way. You may have to wait for hours in a dimly lit corridor. The staff may be short-tempered and dilatory. But eventually you will get treated. In the Central Post Office’s Nixie unit—where mail arrives that has been illegibly or incorrectly addressed—I see street numbers in the seventy thousands; impossible pairings of zip codes and streets; addresses without a name, without a street, without a city; addresses that consist of the description of a building; addresses written in water-based ink that rain has blurred. Skilled Nixie clerks study the orphans one at a time. Either they find a home for them or they apply that most expressive of postal markings, the vermilion finger of accusation that lays the blame squarely on you, the sender.

there was something else, something more complicated, more secret, and that is that girls in those days, even modern girls, like us, girls who went to school and then to university, were always taught that women are entitled to an education and a place outside the home—but only until the children are born. Your life is your own only for a short time: from when you leave your parents' home to your first pregnancy. From that moment, from the first pregnancy, we had to begin to live our lives only around the children. Just like our mothers. Even to sweep pavements for our children, because your child is the chick and you are—what? When it comes down to it, you are just the yolk of the egg, you are what the chick eats so as to grow big and strong. And when your child grows up—even then you can't go back to being yourself, you simply change from being a mother to being a grandmother, whose task is simply to help her children bring up their children. True, even then there were quite a few women who made careers for themselves and went out into the world. But everybody talked about them behind their backs: look at that selfish woman, she sits in meetings while her poor children grow up in the street and pay the price. Now it's a new world. Now at last women are given more opportunity to live lives of their own. Or is it just an illusion? Maybe in the younger generations too women still cry into their pillows at night, while their husbands are asleep, because they feel they have to make impossible choices? I don't want to be judgmental: it's not my world anymore. To make a comparison I'd have to go from door to door checking how many mothers' tears are wept every night into the pillow when husbands are asleep, and to compare the tears then with the tears now.

Heart Disease Starts in Childhood In 1953, a study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association radically changed our understanding of the development of heart disease. Researchers conducted a series of three hundred autopsies on American casualties of the Korean War, with an average age of around twenty-two. Shockingly, 77 percent of soldiers already had visible evidence of coronary atherosclerosis. Some even had arteries that were blocked off 90 percent or more.20 The study “dramatically showed that atherosclerotic changes appear in the coronary arteries years and decades before the age at which coronary heart disease (CHD) becomes a clinically recognized problem.”21 Later studies of accidental death victims between the ages of three and twenty-six found that fatty streaks—the first stage of atherosclerosis—were found in nearly all American children by age ten.22 By the time we reach our twenties and thirties, these fatty streaks can turn into full-blown plaques like those seen in the young American GIs of the Korean War. And by the time we’re forty or fifty, they can start killing us off. If there’s anyone reading this over the age of ten, the question isn’t whether or not you want to eat healthier to prevent heart disease but whether or not you want to reverse the heart disease you very likely already have. Just how early do these fatty streaks start to appear? Atherosclerosis may start even before birth. Italian researchers looked inside arteries taken from miscarriages and premature newborns who died shortly after birth. It turns out that the arteries of fetuses whose mothers had high LDL cholesterol levels were more likely to contain arterial lesions.23 This finding suggests that atherosclerosis may not just start as a nutritional disease of childhood but one during pregnancy. It’s become commonplace for pregnant women to avoid smoking and drinking alcohol. It’s also never too early to start eating healthier for the next generation.

This period when Christian ideas of sexual morality were challenged and overturned coincided with (and very possibly contributed to) industrialized hormonal contraception. This is not the book to debate the pros and cons of the pill—but one consequence of its availability was to sever the connection between sex and procreation. This was nothing short of revolutionary. While people in times past engaged in pre-marital sex, there was always the potential for a pregnancy to occur. Not any more—and this has enormous repercussions for how society thinks about the purpose of sex. No longer is sex assumed to take place only in marriage.

He found the letter she’d written to a lover she imagined when she was pregnant and reading Margaret Atwood. There was no limit to the Atwood she read in bed. She said the letter wasn’t written to anyone that existed and if he’d read these books about pregnancy he would know it was common for lovers to appear and disappear during periods of prolonged bedrest. He wanted to know why she was laughing. What was funny? Was this her version of pop culture? And why did the pillowcase she embroidered for him suddenly look like a parody? She said it was normal to doubt your spouse when you found a suspicious letter but only if you were already prone to suspicious mindsets and revisionist thinking. A serious man wouldn’t take this seriously. A serious man would laugh at what wasn’t true. Sure--there was a racy letter which involved black leather halters but she hadn’t expected milk to leak from her breasts at Starbucks either.

need a lot of things for your babies! But before you invest in double—or triple—of everything, consider what can be shared and what you can borrow. Some things are used only for a short time, while

Dad used to make me tea at night during the pregnancy whenever I was feeling sick.” “Really?” I removed her hands from my stomach. “He did that?” “Yup. He even bought me a bunch of different flavors so I wouldn’t get bored with any of them. He’d bring me a steaming cup in bed and tell me to close my eyes, see if I could guess the flavor.” It was hard to picture this. Him putting water in a pot, boiling it, steeping a mug with Earl Grey, English Breakfast, chamomile. I couldn’t even picture him in the checkout lane at the grocery store with anything other than Miller Lite and jelly beans. That man bringing tea to his pregnant wife wasn’t the same as the one who once picked me up from school two hours late, with crushed Miller Lite cans and gum wrappers covering the floor of his car, the front of his gray gym shorts soaked in piss, shouting over and over, “Get in, we’re going to Disneyland.” I thought about telling Mom this memory, reminding her of that other man. “Or is it something else?” she asked. “What can I do?” She would never be able to help me. Her loyalties would always lie with him, this dead man who showed her sides he never showed to me.

Considered how scared she’d been during her short pregnancy as a warning sign, an emotional hint that their relationship was far more ruinous than she realized. But it was just a thought, different from how she’d felt the other times in her life when she’d firmly ended a relationship with some man. And she’d always firmly ended relationships.

Most of the chronic diseases that plague us now result from living in modern environments.16,17,18,19 This does not mean we would be better off in the environments of our ancestors. Life back then was worse than just nasty, brutal, and short. Imagine having an infected impacted wisdom tooth in a time without dentists. Even minor infected wounds caused death or the slow loss of a limb. The standard treatment, pouring boiling oil on the wound, was only sometimes effective. When steel tools made amputations possible they were swift, because there was no anesthesia. Pregnancy with a large baby meant an agonizing death. Then there was simple starvation. We are far healthier than our ancestors were.

Even though these individuals had seemed perfectly healthy at birth, something that had happened during their development in the womb affected them for decades afterwards. And it wasn’t just the fact that something had happened that mattered, it was when it happened. Events that take place in the first three months of development, a stage when the foetus is really very small, can affect an individual for the rest of their life. This is completely consistent with the model of developmental programming, and the epigenetic basis to this. In the early stages of pregnancy, where different cell types are developing, epigenetic proteins are probably vital for stabilising gene expression patterns. But remember that our cells contain thousands of genes, spread over billions of base-pairs, and we have hundreds of epigenetic proteins. Even in normal development there are likely to be slight variations in the expression of some of these proteins, and the precise effects that they have at specific chromosomal regions. A little bit more DNA methylation here, a little bit less there. The epigenetic machinery reinforces and then maintains particular patterns of modifications, thus creating the levels of gene expression. Consequently, these initial small fluctuations in histone and DNA modifications may eventually become ‘set’ and get transmitted to daughter cells, or be maintained in long-lived cells such as neurons, that can last for decades. Because the epigenome gets ‘stuck’, so too may the patterns of gene expression in certain chromosomal regions. In the short term the consequences of this may be relatively minor. But over decades all these mild abnormalities in gene expression, resulting from a slightly inappropriate set of chromatin modifications, may lead to a gradually increasing functional impairment. Clinically, we don’t recognise this until it passes some invisible threshold and the patient begins to show symptoms.

[Flowy]'d undertaken this mainly because he'd known that going to public school, with girls, would sentence him to fatherhood by age sixteen, and he wanted to evade that pattern, one from which he himself had been born.

Upon me arriving and part of the visa procedure, my spouse and I immediately had to go to a clinic. We were required to take a “medical fitness screening.” We tested for HIV, tuberculosis and leprosy. Depending on your occupation, you could be tested for syphilis, Hepatitis A, B, C and given a pregnancy test. If you fail any of these tests, you will be denied a visa and deported back to your home country. Dubai lies directly within the Arabian Desert which occupies 900,000 square miles.

I put my hands in my pockets, and the pregnancy test I ripped out of the box and tucked into the waistband of my shorts when I wandered away from Skeetah on a trip to the bathroom scratches my side.

But as he approached fifty, Kenny yearned to do something different. Someone told him that More Than Money—the same inheritors group Jeff Weissglass got involved with—was hiring an executive director. He landed the position and, in short order, discovered that his pregnant teens had at least one thing in common with these young heirs and heiresses: Society defined and stereotyped both groups by how much money they did or didn’t have. The foundations that funded adolescent pregnancy care assumed the girls were getting knocked up because they were poor, “which was not necessarily true,” Kenny says, whereas the inheritors were pegged as “entitled and spoiled and lazy—and there’s no basis for that.” The anti-inheritor bias proved so toxic that some of Kenny’s former colleagues shunned him after he took the new job. “They’re like, ‘What a sellout! What a cop-out! Why would you do that?’ ” he recalls. “What does it say about our culture that everyone wants to win the lottery in some way, shape, or form, and there’s a whole segment of our culture that hates people who win the big payout.” This is indeed a paradox. Oscar Mayer heir Chuck Collins gave away his $500,000 inheritance in 1986, when he was a young man. (Invested in the S&P 500, it would be worth about $14 million today.) He has since dedicated himself, through the Institute for Policy Studies, to educating the American public about inequality. His memoir, Born on Third Base, includes the following scene: Speaking to a crowd of about 350 people, he asks who among them feels rage toward the wealthiest 1 percent. Almost everyone raises a hand. He then asks, “How many of you wish you were in the wealthiest 1 percent?” They laugh, but again, almost everyone. “People are envious,” Kenny says. “And what you end up doing with envy is demeaning whoever it is that you envy, because they have what we think we deserve.” During his time at More Than Money, Kenny grew friendly with Paul Schervish, then the director of the Center on Wealth and Philanthropy, and when Schervish offered him the associate director job, Kenny jumped. He’d seen how inheritors grappled with their unearned fortunes. Now he wanted to better understand their parents. Havens was the numbers guy “and I was in charge of: ‘I’d like to know what these people are thinking, and nobody ever asks them.’ 

Approximately two-thirds of couples have a sharp drop in martial satisfaction shortly after a child is born, and this drop gets deeper with each subsequent child. To avoid this drop in martial happiness, fathers need to be involved in the pregnancy, the birth, and caring for the baby, and conflict needs to be low and you need to maintain your sexual relationship.

She had put off getting her epidural prior to her water breaking because she did not think that the contractions had been painful enough to warrant it. This was a mistake (her words). She requested an epidural shortly after that, but unfortunately for her, several other women were also in labor, and there was a limited number of anesthesiologists in the unit to administer the epidural, so she was effectively last in line to receive it. It took approximately three hours between her water breaking to when she received her epidural, and even after that, it took some time for the drugs to have an effect. Throughout those hours, my wife looked like she was in a tremendous amount of pain, and it made me worried that something was wrong.

Dear Mother and Dad: Since I left for college I have been remiss in writing and I am sorry for my thoughtlessness in not having written before. I will bring you up to date now, but before you read on, please sit down. You are not to read any further unless you are sitting down, okay? Well, then, I am getting along pretty well now. The skull fracture and the concussion I got when I jumped out the window of my dormitory when it caught on fire shortly after my arrival here is pretty well healed now. I only spent two weeks in the hospital and now I can see almost normally and only get those sick headaches once a day. Fortunately, the fire in the dormitory, and my jump, was witnessed by a worker at the gas station near the dorm, and he was the one who called the Fire Department and the ambulance. He also visited me in the hospital and since I had nowhere to live because of the burnt out dormitory, he was kind enough to invite me to share his apartment with him. It’s really a basement room, but it’s kind of cute. He is a very fine boy and we have fallen deeply in love and are planning to get married. We haven’t got the exact date yet, but it will be before my pregnancy begins to show. Yes, Mother and Dad, I am pregnant. I know how much you are looking forward to being grandparents and I know you will welcome the baby and give it the same love and devotion and tender care you gave me when I was a child. The reason for the delay in our marriage is that my boyfriend has a minor infection which prevents us from passing our pre-marital blood tests and I carelessly caught it from him. Now that I have brought you up to date, I want to tell you that there was no dormitory fire, I did not have a concussion or skull fracture, I was not in the hospital, I am not pregnant, I am not engaged, I am not infected, and there is no boyfriend. However, I am getting a “D” in American History, and an F in Chemistry, and I want you to see those marks in their proper perspective. Your loving daughter, Sharon Author’s note: Sharon may be failing chemistry, but she gets an A in psychology.

If cisgendered men had vaginas and uteruses, there would be no mystery. There would certainly be a cure for periods, yeast infections, ectopic pregnancies, and menopause. Certainly, abortions would be available everywhere books are sold.

Inevitably her sickness at Thrubworth had developed into a legend of pregnancy, cut short artificially and not occasioned by her husband, but that was probably myth.

Each of the seventeen women was serving a sentence of between thirty to forty years. The majority were poor, uneducated, and young; over a quarter were illiterate and over half had not made it past third grade. All had experienced obstetrical complications at some point during their pregnancies, resulting in late miscarriages. They gave birth unattended. Their newborns were stillborn or died shortly after birth. The women bled so heavily that they sought care at a hospital, where they were arrested.

In the past week or so, she was noticing some minor pains, small episodes of shortness of breath. Probably because she had a fairly decent-sized lifeform hanging off her spine, pummeling her lungs, playing soccer with her bladder. You know, the usual baby games.

Rather than solve the real problems the United States is facing, some politicians, mostly conservative, have decided to try to solve the “female problem” by creating a smoke screen, reintroducing abortion and, more inexplicably, birth control into a national debate. Women have been forced underground for contraception and pregnancy termination before, and we will go underground again if we have to. We will risk our lives if these politicians, who so flagrantly demean women, force us to do so. Thank goodness women do not have short memories.

With clean hands (and short nails) insert your thumbs or index fingers (lubricated with a little K-Y jelly or olive oil if you’d like—but don’t use mineral oil or Vaseline) inside your vagina. Press down (toward your rectum) and slide your fingers across the bottom and sides of your perineum, going in a sweeping semicircle. Relax and breathe gently (don’t hold your breath). Repeat two or three times a week during the last weeks of pregnancy.