They Say: Planning to Work Until the First Contraction? Plan for Surgery.

Miriam Axel-Lute — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 20:00:00 GMT

Women who worked up until their due date had four times the rate of c-sections as women who started their maternity leave at 35 weeks, a new study from UC Berkeley has found.

Now, I'm not sure how you can control for self-selection in that kind of study. I imagine that women starting their maternity leave early are both more likely to be placing a priority on their birth experience and better off financially, each of which could affect their outcomes. (I'm assuming they excluded people with scheduled c-sections from the study.)

On the other hand, the results were is four times as likely, not a titchy 10 to 15 percent or something. That, as Dr. Seuss might say, is a whopping number, and it makes me inclined to think there really is something going on here.

It's not really hard to imagine what either: On the one hand, there's the stress of trying to do your job with an open-ended question of whether you might have to leave at a moment's notice, trying to have things ready and yet still work, with bosses and people who are going to step into your shoes watching you anxiously. And other hand, there's the stress of trying to decide when/if you have to leave when contractions start, whether you're up for driving yourself home, when to call the family, and then changing gears in an instant from worker to woman-in-labor. Hardly optimal conditions.

I was lucky: Since I was leaving my job instead of taking maternity leave, it was easier for me to choose to set my last day at 35 weeks. And I have to say, since my daughter came early (37 weeks and 2 days), I'm extremely glad I did. Even though you never exactly feel prepared, having tied up loose ends, cleared out my desk and said my goodbyes and then taking those two weeks free of deadline pressure and office details to sleep/nest/prepare felt wonderful. It may be the closest thing to taking a complete vacation without traveling I've ever done. Can I prove that that helped with my fairly uncomplicated birth? Of course not, but I wouldn't be surprised.

I know how much of a luxury that sounds like to so many people. I sure as hell couldn't blithely skip five (or even two) weeks of work now. In general, it's hard enough to get maternity or paternity leave at all, and the UC Berkeley researchers, while advocating strongly that maternity leave start earlier, note that people who choose to work up to their due date (or up to their labor as the case often is) are usually doing so because they can't afford maternity leave after the birth otherwise, and clearly that trumps.

I guess for now we can add the health advantages they've identified to the list of casualties of our work-over-family culture.

Image from Take Back Your Time.

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Nesting Nutcases or Pregnant Powerhouses?

Amy Kuras — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 20:03:00 GMT

Oh, those crazy pregnant ladies, with their hormones and their funny little out of control emotions.

That's the tone of this New York Times story about the, shall we say overacheiving nesting taken on by some pregnant women. It profiles several women about the wide-ranging house renovation projects they took on during their pregnancies.

One of those is actress Angela Kinsey of "The Office" who comes across as only slightly less control-freaky (but with a lot more self-deprecating humor) than her character on the show (a severely uptight accountant). She hired someone to enlarge windows in her house, among other things. Windows.

While the attitude of the writer and the contractors interviewed is more than a little infuriatingly patronizing, I have to say I've been through this twice and found myself nodding my head along with some of the women. I so clearly remember bumping my enormous full-term body along my hardwood floors shortly before my daughter was born, cleaning every baseboard in the house to within an inch of its life. My (insanely clean) mother-in-law was coming and I was sure she was going to judge me (some more). My girl is three and I think the baseboards have been cleaned once since. I thought I didn’t nest this time with my son, but then remembered The Kitchen Project of Imminent Divorce and accompanying ruthless organizational spree around the beginning of my third trimester (my marriage did survive, barely).

Nesting might be a little crazy –but when else is a busy mother supposed to have time or energy for that stuff?

Strollerderby : nesting

They Say: Planning to Work Until the First Contraction? Plan for Surgery.

Nesting Nutcases or Pregnant Powerhouses?