Pregnant mums warned 'eating for two is a myth'

Mothers-to-be should be warned that 'eating for two' is a myth, according to draft Health Service guidelines.
They do not need to drink full-fat milk or change their diet at all for the first six months of the pregnancy.

Even in the last three months they need just 200 extra calories a day - the equivalent of a small sandwich.

New advice on weight management during pregnancy comes as the number of obese mothers is rising, with almost one in four women being obese and a further third overweight.

It says women should be advised that being fat puts their baby at risk, but not told to lose weight.

Instead they should be helped to shed excess pounds before getting pregnant and after they have given birth.

The guidance from the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) is now out for consultation.

Professor Mike Kelly, Director of the Centre for Public Health Excellence at NICE, said: 'Women are bombarded by often conflicting advice on what constitutes a healthy diet and how much physical activity they should do during pregnancy and after birth.

'The aim of developing this new guidance is to provide health professionals with clear recommendations to help them support women prior to and during their pregnancy as well as after they have given birth.

'Many overweight women have healthy babies, but the evidence suggests that there are more risks associated with pregnancies in women who have a BMI of over 30.'

He said the advice takes into account the demands of looking after a small baby and how tired mothers are.

'But it also aims to dispel any myths about what and how much to eat during pregnancy - there is no need to "eat for two" or to drink full-fat milk,' he said.

'It's important for women to understand that weight loss after birth takes time and that physical activity and gradual weight loss will not affect a woman's ability to breastfeed.'

The Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists says the recommended maximum limit for pregnancy weight gain is 10-12 kilograms, around one and three quarter stones.

Rosie Dodds of the National Childbirth Trust said: 'Women are more likely to make changes to their diet when they are pregnant and this opportunity can improve the family eating pattern for the future.

'NCT welcomes this draft guidance which should ensure better consistency of support from health professionals and tailoring of the services offered to the needs of women.

'In some areas, women on low incomes need improved access to affordable nourishing foods, especially fresh fruit and vegetables

Eighteen miscarriages - Woman finally gives birth to her 'little miracle"

Eighteen miscarriages - Woman finally gives birth to her 'little miracle"

Transgender man pregnant for a third time

Thomas Beatie is reportedly pregnant with his third child.
US website Momlogic.com said that Beatie was pregnant again but did not confirm a due date.

Beatie, a trans man who lives legally in his acquired gender, has conceived and given birth to two children since 2007. His wife Nancy is unable to conceive.

The Oregon couple's daughter was born in June 2008 and a son followed a year later.

Despite being legally defined as a man for over ten years and having had some gender reassignment surgery, Beatie kept his female reproductive organs.

He is thought to have had natural births with his two children and his wife breastfed both.

Before starting a family, Beatie had been on hormone treatments, but stopped taking them in order to resume menstruating and conceive through artificial insemination. Both children were conceived with the help of sperm donors.

Speaking to Oprah Winfrey in April 2008, Beatie said: "I actually opted not to do anything to my reproductive organs because I wanted to have a child one day. I see pregnancy as a process and it doesn’t define who I am.”

Read more information on 'Looking for a sperm donor'

www.prideangel.com

Artificial Insemination at Home

Many women may choose artificial insemination at home rather than using a fertility clinic. Reasons for performing home insemination include, the reduced cost, the higher chance of getting pregnant using fresh sperm, the ability to use a known donor or co-parent , and that your partner can be involved in the home insemination process making it feel like you are ‘creating a baby together’.
Home insemination is often performed in the comfort of your own home using an artificial insemination kit, this normally contain syringes, containers for the collection of sperm and some kits also contain speculums and extender tips which enable the sperm to be positioned near to the cervix to improve pregnancy chances.

A question which many people ask Pride Angel is ‘What is the success rate of home insemination?’ This is often difficult to answer because there are so many factors which affect its success. If performed correctly and at the right time then insemination at home is as effective as ‘natural insemination’. Factors which effect pregnancy success, as with natural insemination, include performing the insemination at the right time of the month, ideally just before ,ovulation. This is often performed using an ovulation test.

A woman’s age and general health play a large part in their fertility, trying to get pregnant in your twenties in far easier than in your late thirties or forties. Drinking, smoking and how healthy your diet is also greatly effects your fertility. If using a donor who has not previously had child it is also worth getting his sperm count checked out using a male fertility test such as ‘Fertilcount’.

As with natural insemination, home insemination can take several months to be successful and in some cases can take up to a year, so a commitment from your donor is needed for a minimum of two sperm samples per month.

Home insemination does carry a higher risk of sexually transmitted infection than using frozen sperm from a fertility clinic; therefore Pride Angel recommends you seek advice from your GP regarding health screening checks for yourself and your donor. We also recommend before considering home insemination that you get advice from a fertility law specialist regarding legal and parental rights.

Pride Angel

www.prideangel.com

Male Infertility - Infertile men having infertile sons!

We normally give nature short shrift, but IVF could be storing up problems for the future

A few years back, in a book called Everything Conceivable, on the subject – you've guessed it – of infertility treatment, the author, US journalist Liza Mundy, said the unsayable about IVF. If a man isn't able to have children, she suggested, perhaps he ought not to be having them. An inability to father children may be an excellent way of stopping men with dodgy genes from passing them on. Or, as she put it, "Genetic infertility is nature's way of making sure the same mistake does not happen twice. Genetic infertility is nature's levee, if you will, holding back a flood of chromosomal mishaps."

Well, we normally give nature short shrift over here, particularly when it comes to the subject of people being able to have children, pretty well regardless of where they're at – in their 60s, gay-and-lesbian, single, you name it. But whether we're creating problems in the future hasn't featured much in discussions about infertility.

Now there is a new Anglo-German study from London's Institute of Child Health, which bears out the concerns of other experts about the wisdom of a technique for circumventing male fertility problems, called ICSI (Intracytoplasmic Sperm Injection), which involves injecting sperm directly into an egg. That includes sperm that would be also-rans in a normal conception.

Boys conceived by this method were more likely than those conceived naturally to have shorter fingers – apparently men with ring fingers the same length as their index finger tend to have fertility problems. (It's one way for couples to while away their Valentine's dinner – comparing finger lengths.) In other words, thanks to IVF, infertile men are begetting infertile sons. Who may, thanks to IVF, be able to beget more.

And, as Liza Mundy gloomily observed, if they do, "infertility would be magnified, like compound interest". On the downside, the human race could die out. On the bright side, it would make the population experts, who attribute global warming to population growth, happy.

And if you thought that it was just a problem for boys, think on. Another study, this time from St Andrews and Edinburgh universities, found that by the time a woman is 30, only 12 per cent of the eggs she was born with remain. Cue for Bridget Jones-style angst. Then again, since women are born with about two million of them, it sounds like plenty to me.

www.prideangel.com

Natural Insemination - 'a risky option'

Risks of choosing natural insemination as a method of conceiving
For many women the overwhelming desire to have a child means they will go to great lengths to achieve their dream of becoming a mum. Those not wishing to go down the fertility clinic route are left with two main options artificial insemination or natural insemination. Pride Angel investigates why the risks of choosing natural insemination as an option is extremely concerning. Surely the majority of lesbian women would not wish to choose natural insemination ‘sexual intercourse’ with a man, however a minority of donors do offer natural insemination to lesbian couples and single women promoting that it is the most effective and ‘natural’ way of conception.

‘Obvious risks not only include the physical safety of having ‘sex’ with an unknown person, but the far greater chance of getting a sexually transmitted infection such as HIV. Donors may proclaim their clean bill of health by showing a week old test result, however many infections do not show up in blood tests until 4-6 weeks after catching the infection. Therefore health test results cannot be relied upon from donors who offer natural insemination ‘unprotected sex’ in the same way that any promiscuous man would be a higher risk.’said Erika from Pride Angel.

‘ Many infections are spread by blood or physical contact, for example hepatitis C is spread by contact with blood, herpes (genital warts ) is spread by physical skin to skin contact. Therefore the act of sexual intercourse itself puts women at more risk of acquiring infections than artificial insemination’ stated founders of Pride Angel.

Pride Angel recommends recipients get to know their sperm donors, ensuring their personal safety, checking their identity and health screening tests thoroughly.

http://prideangel.com

IVF mania

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IVF mania: Make me a baby
February 1, 2010 19:37 by PrideAngelAdmin
Old, young, single, gay - almost anybody can now have IVF if their pockets are deep enough. We have all gone procreation mad
Earlier this month, Neil and Monique Ward hit the headlines for their unstinting determination to conceive. It took them 25 years, 21 attempts, two donated eggs and a staggering £100,000 to secure at last their elusive goal and become the proud parents of twin boys. Unusually, in the recent run of news and outrage about elderly patients seeking IVF, they are a mere 56 and 46 years old respectively. “Every failed attempt was like going through a divorce,” Neil says. “But Monique kept seeing all these film stars in their forties having babies, and she’d say, ‘If these people can do it, why can’t I?’ So we took on a mortgage, sold a few things, borrowed money from Monique’s father. In the end, it’s only money, isn’t it?”

Nowadays, pretty much anyone, whatever their circumstances, can reasonably hope to conceive if their pockets are deep enough, and at times it seems that we are in the grip of procreation fever. You may be a woman in your sixties or even seventies, but you, too, can now have a child. Single or gay? No problem. Last November was the first time the multi-million-pound IVF industry displayed the full array of its wizardry under one roof. Visitors to the Fertility Show at Olympia, in London, had only to glance around the vast number of diverse stalls to see that having a baby has never been so readily available to such a wide demographic, nor so fraught with moral complexity. You want to choose the gender? There’s a clinic that can fix it. Or to screen out any genetic abnormalities? Somewhere out there is the embryologist for you. Looking to rent a womb? Why don’t you outsource to India, where it’s rapidly becoming a popular way of escaping poverty for women of child-bearing age. You can choose an egg donor who’s a graduate of Yale; or find a sperm donor for their eye colour and have the sperm shipped directly to you through the post.

Barrie Drewitt and Tony Barlow, the gay millionaires who bypassed UK laws when they paid an American surrogate to carry their twins, first highlighted this growing new social trend a decade ago, when they became the first same-sex British couple to register as joint parents on a birth certificate. There’s now even a term for a child born to a couple like Barrie and Tony: gayby

Read more:www.timesonline.co.uk

in reference to:

"Pride AngelHome About Us Membership Faqs Fertility & Pregnancy Health Screening Forum Blogs Shop IVF mania: Make me a baby February 1, 2010 19:37 by PrideAngelAdmin Old, young, single, gay - almost anybody can now have IVF if their pockets are deep enough. We have all gone procreation mad Earlier this month, Neil and Monique Ward hit the headlines for their unstinting determination to conceive. It took them 25 years, 21 attempts, two donated eggs and a staggering £100,000 to secure at last their elusive goal and become the proud parents of twin boys. Unusually, in the recent run of news and outrage about elderly patients seeking IVF, they are a mere 56 and 46 years old respectively. “Every failed attempt was like going through a divorce,” Neil says. “But Monique kept seeing all these film stars in their forties having babies, and she’d say, ‘If these people can do it, why can’t I?’ So we took on a mortgage, sold a few things, borrowed money from Monique’s father. In the end, it’s only money, isn’t it?” Nowadays, pretty much anyone, whatever their circumstances, can reasonably hope to conceive if their pockets are deep enough, and at times it seems that we are in the grip of procreation fever. You may be a woman in your sixties or even seventies, but you, too, can now have a child. Single or gay? No problem. Last November was the first time the multi-million-pound IVF industry displayed the full array of its wizardry under one roof. Visitors to the Fertility Show at Olympia, in London, had only to glance around the vast number of diverse stalls to see that having a baby has never been so readily available to such a wide demographic, nor so fraught with moral complexity. You want to choose the gender? There’s a clinic that can fix it. Or to screen out any genetic abnormalities? Somewhere out there is the embryologist for you. Looking to rent a womb? Why don’t you outsource to India, where it’s rapidly becoming a popular way of escaping poverty for women of child-bearing age. You can choose an egg donor who’s a graduate of Yale; or find a sperm donor for their eye colour and have the sperm shipped directly to you through the post. Barrie Drewitt and Tony Barlow, the gay millionaires who bypassed UK laws when they paid an American surrogate to carry their twins, first highlighted this growing new social trend a decade ago, when they became the first same-sex British couple to register as joint parents on a birth certificate. There’s now even a term for a child born to a couple like Barrie and Tony: gayby Read more:www.timesonline.co.uk"
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