It’s a wonder we had babies at all before the pregnancy police
The only piece of advice that anyone really needs is: try not to be a total idiot
Not for the first time, I find myself swooningly grateful to have been an elderly primigravida.
Which is, for those of you currently wondering if I am some kind of great ape or simply the unexpected holder of one of England’s more obscure archaic titles, is the name given by doctors to any woman who becomes pregnant for the first time after the age of 35.
Post 35, basically, all your parts start to go rusty or come loose, so they have to keep a closer eye on you and occasionally tighten everything up with a spanner so the baby doesn’t drop out too early. But I can see I’m losing you with all this technical medical detail, so let us move on.
I am grateful for my late start in the field of breeding endeavour, because if I had had to face down the barrage of pregnancy advice and information any younger than I did, I think it would have broken me. In the past seven days alone, there have been news headlines about maternal depression knocking points off a child’s IQ, how putting children to bed too late makes them more likely to become overweight, and how taking painkillers in pregnancy can affect not just your child’s future fertility but their children’s, too. That’s quite the headache.
These, of course, are just the icing on top of the cake you’re also not allowed to eat in case you become TOO great with child (though did you know that you can also put on too little weight while pregnant? So maybe a slice of lemon drizzle every other trimester wouldn’t go amiss).
Beneath them are all the other things it has become standard practice to treat as toxic for the duration: caffeine, unpasteurised cheese, sushi and alcohol. They rest on a plinth made of the inarguable – stay away from drugs and cigarettes, because drugs and cigarettes are bad for you in any quantity, whether you are podding or not.
In my younger days, I would have taken all of this seriously. I suspect I would even have drawn up a spreadsheet to keep track of what I could and could not safely ingest, according to the latest research every day. Whether it would have occurred to me to wonder how any harm done by the cortisol spikes caused by such anxious fretting matched up against the supposed harm of the substances themselves, I cannot say. Age brings a greater invulnerability. An appraising eye. A distrustful attitude and a weary soul. All these things serve you well when it comes to sifting wheat from chaff.
My own pregpiphany came when I read an article that reckoned tap water was unsafe for mothers-to-be. “Hang on,” I thought. “Forgive me, authoritative-looking print written in authoritative tones under authoritative-looking byline picture – but, if that were true, we would not be here. We would all be long dead in the ditches we once used as sources of decidedly less potable water. I discard you. Utterly.” I had similar thoughts about unpasteurised cheese and sushi. How then, I reasoned, do you explain France and Japan?
Now I can go even further. My appraising eye can look not only to the past but to the future and ask: is a possibly deleterious but still far from proven effect on a notional grandchild’s fertility worth me enduring a migraine now? Or not? Not. I can reckon that late bedtimes are probably a sign of an agglomeration of lifestyle factors that are likely to be resulting in childhood obesity rather than a simple cause of fatty effect.
And so on, all while still being able to see that it probably remains a good idea not to start smoking or taking heroin, at least until retirement. As ever, the only piece of advice that anyone ever really needs is: try not to be a total idiot.
But the waters are easily muddied. A little information can be a dangerous thing, but lots of little bits of information can be even worse.
Unless you are a fully qualified expert in whatever scientific (or more often pseudoscientific) corner in which the new pearl of wisdom has been grubbed up, a pregnant woman – and/or her partner, who will often and increasingly tiresomely also like to offer their opinion on the matter – will take one of the only two options available to any overwhelmed animal. Either she will err on the side of caution by excising the potentially harmful item from her life, which at the current rate of progress will see her living off boiled water and biorhythmically grown mung beans by the time labour starts; or she will ignore everything, which probably includes a lot of perfectly sound recommendations, too. Basic principles get lost in a flood of lesser claims and it becomes harder to find the time and energy to go diving back down for them.
People always react wrongly to advice. The neurotic take it too seriously and tie themselves in knots far more harmful to their own and their offspring’s mental health (and remember – depression makes your kid a dumbo! And we all know depression’s a choice! So choose wisely!) while the people who most need it resist it and use the extreme recommendations to undermine the bedrock ones (“They said water’s bad for you! So mine’s a straight vodka. And a fag”).
There needs to be a de minimis requirement evidentially before any of these researches is given airtime, so they don’t suck up the oxygen of publicity and the portion of attention span required by the tried and true. Either that, or we need to impose a minimum age and level of cynicism to be proved before someone’s allowed to get pregnant. Elderly primigravidae unite! We have nothing to lose but our grandchildren’s fertility if we’re wrong! And we’ll have let their parents live with us rent-free till we died by then, so it all evens out in the end.