Babies Tale

Women are always prone to an iron deficiency because they lose blood every month through menstruation. If a woman does not have sufficient reserves before pregnancy, anemia may result because of the increased volume of blood circulating through the body. Symptoms of anemia include tiredness, lethargy, irritability and pale skin. Anemia is treated easily with iron supplements.

Diabetes

Women with diabetes run special risks in pregnancy and are usually kept under careful medical supervision. However, today it is perfectly possible for a woman with diabetes to have a normal pregnancy and labor.

Diabetes can be unmasked by pregnancy because pregnancy puts extra strain on the body. Older mothers are more susceptible to this. If diabetes is detected with a urine test, the mother’s blood-sugar levels will be monitored. Diabetes may be controlled by diet alone or with insulin injections, the dosage of which may be altered as the pregnancy progresses. Because a woman with diabetes is at risk of having an unusually large baby, birth is sometimes induced early or the mother may be advised to have a Cesarean-section delivery.

Jenny is diabetic and had two children in her thirties. “I knew from the beginning of my first pregnancy that I was going to have a Cesarean. When my first child was born, almost all diabetic women ended up with a Cesarean. It was done with an epidural so I would be awake to see the baby, but the epidural went wrong. I had a headache and had to lie flat on my back for 48 hours after the birth, and I had pain in my legs for about ten days afterwards.

“I waited five years to get pregnant again. I wanted to have the same kind of birth a healthy person does, because that’s how I see myself. There was a little scare because the baby was overdue, but when I was one week late I went in, was induced and had a normal, easy birth.”

Pre-eclampsia

This is a metabolic disturbance in pregnancy with symptoms of high blood pressure, swelling of the feet, hands and ankles and protein in the urine. It occurs more frequently in older women, but is also linked to obesity and poor nutrition. If untreated, the woman will get headaches, blurred vision and may go on to develop eclampsia, in which she suffers from seizures. The main risk is not to the mother but to the baby, because there is a high risk of premature labor.

Pre-eclampsia is usually treated with bed rest. The mother’s blood pressure is watched carefully. If it is late in the pregnancy and her blood pressure goes too high, the baby will typically be delivered early by Cesarean section.

Postpartum Hemorrhage

Bleeding before 28 weeks in pregnancy usually results in a miscarriage. After 28 weeks any bleeding is known as postpartum hemorrhage and has two main causes: placental abruption, a rare condition in which the placenta separates from the wall of the uterus, and placenta previa. Both conditions are slightly more common in older mothers.

Placenta previa is a condition in which the placenta is attached to the lower part of the womb, near or even over the cervix. This results in bleeding during pregnancy and more bleeding as soon as labor starts. Usually the condition can be identified with an ultrasound scan. Most mothers with placenta previa have to rest in the hospital until the baby is due. This helps prevent bleeding. The baby is delivered by Cesarean section.

Miscarriage

Miscarriage is a problem of great concern to older mothers. This risk is particularly disturbing for mothers who have had problems conceiving.

The risk of miscarriage for older mothers is greater than for younger mothers. It is not commonly known that as many as one in six recognized pregnancies end in miscarriage; the numbers would be higher still if all pregnancies were counted, including those that end so soon that a period is only slightly delayed or not delayed at all. There seems to be a slightly higher risk of miscarriage in a first pregnancy.

Miscarriages are even more common for older mothers. One study of women who conceived through artificial insemination by donor showed that by the age of 40 a mother had a 50% chance of having a miscarriage. Studies have shown that about 50% of miscarried fetuses are genetically abnormal. This is why many people try to comfort the woman who has lost her baby with “It’s nature’s way of getting rid of babies that are not normal.” In older mothers, the proportion of fetuses with abnormalities may be higher. New research on helping older women conceive using hormone replacement and donated eggs has shown that it is more likely to be the quality of the embryo than deficiencies in the mother’s womb that cause a pregnancy to fail.

Having one miscarriage does not mean you have any greater chance of a second. After two miscarriages, the risk does go up, from about one in five to one in three; after three subsequent miscarriages, the chances are about 50/50 that the pregnancy will go to term. But the great majority of women who have miscarriages will have a healthy baby eventually.

Medically, a distinction is made between miscarriages that occur up to about I2 or I3 weeks and those that occur after this time, because they usually have different causes. The great majority of miscarriages-about 85%-occur before the end of the twelfth week of pregnancy.

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