The Uterus Update 🗞️

Covid and IVF, how much energy it really takes to grow a baby – and self-medicating orangutans 🌿

Photo by Celine Ylmz on Unsplash

It’s reproductive health round-up week here at Life, Almost. For new subscribers (hello!👋) I do one of these a month. I keep an eye out for interesting developments and findings relevant to reproductive health, fertility, and maternity care, then break them all down for you, in one handy place.

Before we get into it, I wanted to say that the past couple of weeks have been quite heavy for pregnancy and maternity-care related news, here in the UK, what with both birth trauma and baby deaths as a result of rising cases of whooping cough dominating headlines. This is obviously really important reporting – and absolutely essential if anything is ever going to change for the better.

But I won’t pretend that this media backdrop doesn’t sometimes take its toll, when you are someone who is already acutely, intimately aware of such experiences; when it’s not ‘just’ a headline, it’s your life.

So, what I’m saying is go carefully with this edition – if you want to skip to the end for an important research finding about orangutans, then please do. Or you could pop over and join us in this week’s discussion thread, which is my first ever Ask Me Anything.

In the news…

Pregnancy requires far more calories than scientists previously thought. If I’ve understood this story correctly, until this new study set out to pinpoint accurate numbers on the energy requirements of reproduction – across lots of species, including humans – there was a wildly incorrect assumption that most energy intake in pregnancy went directly to the growing foetus, rather than being used by the mother’s body. Turns out, science has been massively underestimating the cost of work being done by women’s bodies this whole time! Also: I find it very adorable that the (male) lead researcher was surprised no one had bothered to look at this data properly before... 🙃 (New York Times)