Making Sense of Pregnancy: What Experts Want you To Know About Your Body

I am both hopeful and moved, AND filled with disbelief after my conversation with today's guest.  He is an OB who has done an inordinate amount of work to make birth safer first for Californians, then for women across the country. His work, which you'll hear about and be able to use in your own pregnancy, is inspiring.  What I can't get my head around is the state of maternity care...

 Many pregnancy complications cluster around issues with the placenta, the first fetal organ to form in a pregnancy. Here at the end of 2025, this organ still holds a significant amount of mystery. It's a wily organ that comes in many different forms across the animal kingdom. Even looking at how other mammals have handled the job of nutrient delivery, gas exchange, and waste removal during p...

 How the placenta develops and the ways in which that development affect both the mother and the pregnancy have been a mystery since pregnancy became a subject of study. Much of medicine focuses on the symptoms that come from pregnancy complications and tries to find a way to fix if not the problem, then the symptom.  Today's guest who looks at pregnancy with an evolutionary biology perspecti...

We all know the placenta as this life giving organ, the first to develop in pregnancy; a critical connection between mother and fetus that sends food and oxygen to the baby and eliminates the fetal waste products. Only recently did I trip over the fact that it takes a minute to make this incredible organ. How long does it take and while its under construction? How exactly is the embryo and then fe...

 Why is an active immune system important both in pregnancy and before pregnancy when you're trying to prepare the uterine lining, AKA, the decidua?  That was the topic of last week's conversation with Dr. Berg's, and this week we talk about what we do and don't know about how to create a uterine lining that's hospitable to pregnancy, and the challenges of being able to pr...

  Talk to any person who does research on pregnancy, and you may get a variety of different answers about the source of different pregnancy complications, and at what point in pregnancy we would have to turn back the clock to effectively intervene and increase the chances of a healthy pregnancy? Today's guest dates that time at the period before pregnancy even starts. She and her colleagues a...

   The very important role of a certain type of immune cell called neutrophils in pregnancy is the topic of today's episode. This is a continuation of the conversation we had last week with Dr. Suta NAD Carney, , who  is a researcher at the William Harvey Research Institute, faculty of Medicine and Dentistry at the Queen Mary University of London. We were talking about, the work she's do...

 Many pregnancy complications have a whodunit quality to them. Scientists don't yet understand exactly why things go wrong when they go wrong, but researchers tend to agree at this point that if there are issues with the placenta, the lifeline for the fetus, they can reverberate through the pregnancy into well-known conditions like preeclampsia, intrauterine growth restriction, in some cases...

 Miscarriage and the failure of an embryo to implant are often attributed to issues with an aggressive immune system. Today I'm gonna tell you some stories about your immune system, and in particular how your immune system behaves in pregnancy, TLDR, you could not get pregnant without significant immune activity. Your body is reliant on your immune system to help it manage the development of...

 If you wanna know what factors contribute to miscarriages, you need to understand what factors contribute to and detract from making the uterus into a hospitable place for pregnancy, both implantation and development. My guest last week, Dr. Jan Brosens, spoke about some of the key conditions that make implantation and development more and less likely, namely the presence of the just right mix of...

Since women have been having babies they've experienced miscarriages. For nearly as long, we have not had a useful way to address miscarriage. Often doctors shrug at your first miscarriage and say it's a normal part of pregnancy. And if it arises because of aneuploidy, the fertilized egg has the wrong number of chromosomes, at this point there is not much we can do about that.  But there...

Last week we talked about the technology, originally used to look at inflammation in the brain and heart, applied to the placenta. This amazing form of MRI, which is both non invasive and safe, allows for real time information about inflammation in a pregnancy in progress. Today I'll finish my conversation with Dr. Yong Wang about what he and his team found in the study that used this technol...

The placenta is critically important for the success of a pregnancy, being the physical connection between the mother's body and the developing fetus. Defects in the placenta tend to have significant consequences for the pregnancy and the fetus, including things like preeclampsia, preterm birth and maybe also congenital heart defects. So understanding what's going on in the placenta befo...

This week we will focus on what in G-ds good name is going on in the uterus during your cycle. I don’t think I’m going too far out on a ledge to say that most of us consider our period an inconvenience at best, but when you hear some of the details of what’s actually going on, you may look at it differently. what’s happening in your uterus each month reads like science fiction–cells following horm...

Pregnancy can appear smooth when everything, or nearly everything goes according to plan--basically. But if you're part of the group of people for which it has not gone smoothly, in pursuit of what may have gone wrong, you find that this process is actually ridiculously complicated. One opportunity to appreciate this comes with IVF when doctors efforts to manage more aspects of this process c...

This week’s episode is the ‘Making Sense of Pregnancy’ version of the broadway play (and now movie) Wicked: it provides the back story of a critical character in pregnancy that you likely didn’t know enough about.  It also serves as a useful introduction to next week’s show that features the work of a scientist who is trying to untangle one possible path to preeclampsia that seems to arise in wome...

If we wanted to bury the phrase “bounce back” to describe our expectation about how a body should respond in postpartum, I think today’s conversation can effectively do that.  I talk to a researcher who has gathered the largest sample of data about women, before, during and after pregnancy, tracking 76 different lab values for 300,000 women between 2003 and 2020. His work shows the significant cha...

When it comes to categorizing pregnant women as high or low risk, we leave so much information on the table--which keeps us limited to the model where doctors use broad averages to triage care for pregnant women. Age is a definitive way to categorize pregnant women. On average a woman who is 35 or older is considered of advanced maternal age and may be watched more carefully throughout the pregnan...

In the olden days, women measured something called basal body temperature (BBT), which is core temperature, to track ovulation by measuring their temperature right when they wake up--it's the first thing you'd do-- with a special thermometer that measured to at least one-tenth of a degree, and record it on a chart  (maybe on your phone, maybe on paper) to identify a subtle temperature sh...

The uterus has really lurked in the shadows of gestational research.  We imagined that it was just a place where the fertilized egg decided to settle and grow. But recent research has recast the uterus in a more prominent role.  To hear about how this research has overturned what we thought about pregnancy and placental function, I talked with a biologist who has focused on this topic for much of...

The how and when of uterine contractions--how are uterine contractions initiated? Whats the trigger or triggers? And when it happens too early, why does it happen too early?  are questions we haven't been able to answer as of yet.   Or maybe more accurately, we have a bunch of different possible answers, but we don't know how they interact with one another.  Today I finish my conversatio...

One of the big unknowns in pregnancy, and there are many, is what initiates labor. Researchers point to many different possible triggers, and likely it is some combination of signals from the placenta, the fetus and the mother that kick off productive contractions.  This is a highly sought after bit of information in part because if we knew what initiated labor, maybe, just maybe we could turn it...

Today we are all about fetal programming. It's also known as the Barker Hypothesis or Fetal Origins of Health and Disease. This theory suggests that the uterine environment can impact not just immediate health for the baby, but long-term health as well. The theory suggests that the nine month window of pregnancy is a particularly critical time in the body's development. It is when all or...

It should not ALSO be a mother's job to catch her own depression after delivery. In pregnancy care in the future, imagine if you walked into your OBs office in your third trimester and you got a blood test that could predict how likely you are to run into postpartum depression?  Among all your other novel and challenging responsibilites as the caretaker of a newborn, it would not be your resp...

 This week's episode is kind of a how to episode. It's how do you grow a placenta, an entirely new organ, and quickly. Probably a more accurate title would be how do we think we might grow a placenta? How does a placenta develop? Maybe because in truth we have by no means worked out all of the details about how this critical life-giving organ is formed. Having said that, let's run t...