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Dr Cecilia Bottomley,

Dr Cecilia Bottomley, consultant obstetrician and gynaecologist, explains what the pregnancy condition pre-eclampsia is and how it can affect both the mother and baby.

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Many parents would despair at the thought of their 15-year-old daughter becoming pregnant.

But Soya Keaveney’s mother Janis takes a more positive view.

The unemployed 48-year-old says Soya, whose baby with boyfriend Jake Gray, 17, is due in January, will make a ‘wonderful mother’. Not to mention that the new arrival means the family will be handed a bigger council house.

Mrs Keaveney has already attracted accusations of encouraging the premature sexualisation of her daughter.

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Failed pregnancies can result from fatty ovaries, researchers claim

Fatty ovaries can upset embryonic development and lead to failed pregnancies, research suggests.

The findings, from a study carried out on cow eggs, supports advice to women to avoid being overweight if they want to conceive.

They may help explain why obese women and those with diabetes often struggle to conceive, say researchers from an Anglo-Dutch project. These individuals tend to metabolise more stored fat, leading to higher fatty acid levels in the ovary.

The study involved exposing eggs from cows to high concentrations of saturated fatty acids. Researchers discovered embryos created from the fat-exposed eggs had fewer cells, and underwent changes in gene and metabolic activity.

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A derby-winning horse trainer unfairly dismissed a pregnant worker by using a biased staff scoring system, an employment tribunal has ruled.

Julia Bocan, 28, was made redundant by John Gosden, who owns stables in Newmarket, after telling colleagues on a night out that she was two months pregnant.

She claims Mr Gosden specifically designed a new staff performance chart so that she would score the lowest and be sacked. She took her case to an employment tribunal, which has ruled she was unlawfully selected for redundancy.

However, the panel for the hearing in Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk, dismissed her claim for sexual discrimination on the grounds of pregnancy.

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The advice from the GP to his pregnant patient was clear.

As an asthmatic, the steroids she took to control her condition could harm the baby. Better to be safe than sorry, and put her asthma treatment on hold until after the birth.

Overwhelmed by the thought of harming her longed-for child, the mother-to-be halted her medication. A few weeks later she was dead, the victim of a severe asthma attack. Had she continued with her steroids she doubtless would be alive today.

This harrowing true story is, sadly, not unique.Instead, it is another tragic example of how doctors working with pregnant women and new mothers are so petrified of placing the child in any danger that they regularly put the mother’s life at risk.

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Women who are obese or overweight before they get pregnant are more likely to have children who suffer wheezing or asthma.

The rise in risk ranges from 20 to 30 per cent, compared with women who have a healthy pre-pregnancy weight.

Professor Marjo-Riitta Jarvelin, study author from Imperial College London, said there was a relationship between increasing maternal weight and increased risk of asthma symptoms.

She said: ‘The heavier the women, the more the risk of wheezing and asthma-like symptoms.

‘The children of obese women who have a history of allergy also have a much higher risk of wheezing.

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Bridget Jones to return in a pregnancy love triangle while Austin Powers may swing back to the big screen, according to reports

A third Bridget Jones film is set to enter production, according to Entertainment Weekly. The site reports that Working Title Films, the British company which brought both 2001′s Bridget Jones’s Diary and 2004′s Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason to the big screen is preparing a third instalment, rumours of which have been circulating since at least March 2009. The main obstacle in the past was reportedly star Renée Zellweger’s unwillingness to pile on the pounds to reprise her role as the curvaceous eternal singleton, though the option of wheeling out a slimline Bridget for film No 3 had been mulled over.

The first Bridget Jones film was a critical and commercial success, taking $281m (£172m) around the world and breaking UK box office records. Sequel The Edge of Reason maintained its predecessor’s box office clout with $262m but was condemned by critics.

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Permanent birth control for women once meant major surgery that carried a host of risks.

Tubal ligation – more usually referred to as ‘having your tubes tied’ – involves a keyhole procedure under general anaesthetic, in which the Fallopian tubes, through which unfertilised eggs travel from the ovaries to the womb, are either severed, burned shut or clamped with a small clip. This is usually followed by a week-long hospital stay – and, worst of all, it’s far from foolproof.

Complications include heavy or irregular monthly cycles, and there is a still a one-in- 200 chance of a pregnancy, which is more likely to be ectopic – in which a foetus begins to grow in a Fallopian tube, risking life-threatening internal bleeding.

Now, a new method that involves no anaesthetic, no cutting and just a simple 20-minute process to insert two tiny spring-like implants, could be an alternative for women considering sterilisation. The failure rate is one in 1,000, the same as for the male equivalent of tubal ligation, the vasectomy.

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Two Roman Catholic nurses have won the right not to work in an abortion clinic after they accused the NHS of breaching equality laws.

The case is believed to be the first in which the Equality Act has been used successfully to defend a “pro-life” position as a philosophical belief and could have implications for other Christian medical staff.
The nurses, who are both from overseas and do not wish to be identified, were moved from their normal nursing duties at a London hospital to work once a week at an abortion clinic.
They were required to administer two drugs to pregnant women – Mifepristone and Misoprostol – to cause an induced miscarriage. The process, known as “early medical abortion”, is an increasingly common method of terminating a pregnancy and does not involve surgery.
When the nurses discovered that they were participating in abortions they objected but were told by managers that they must continue with the work.

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The number of women dying in childbirth every year is 10 times higher than the civilians killed in the conflict. But a new clinic is offering a brighter future

Abdul Manan stood expectantly outside the maternity unit awaiting the birth of his first child, his calm facade only betrayed by the way his head snapped around each time the delivery room door opened. On the other side of the door, his teenage bride Firoza barely whimpered as she entered the final stages of a long labour, assisted by an increasingly fraught looking midwife.

In many parts of the world, it would be a variation on an entirely normal scene. But in Afghanistan, where the number of women who die in child birth annually is 10 times higher than the civilians killed in the bloody conflict, Abdul’s insistence on bringing his wife to the newly built hospital unit represents a dramatic sign of progress. The country competes with Sierra Leone for the highest maternal mortality rate in the world. Every year, 24,000 women perish from complications in pregnancy that would be easily treatable in the UK. Only the day before, Dr Abdul Latif explained mournfully, he had lost a patient who had just given birth. By the time her husband capitulated and brought her to hospital, she was haemorrhaging so badly he and three of his fellow doctors could not save her.

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Teenage motherhood is ‘contagious’ within families, according to a study.

Scientists have discovered that the sister of a teenage mother is twice as likely to follow in her footsteps as a girl with no family experience of early motherhood.

And the ‘peer effect’ on girls aged 16 to 19 was shown to have a far more powerful impact than any education or advice they are given at school. It was most pronounced when the sisters were close in age. The study, conducted by researchers at Bristol University, may help to explain why the previous government’s Teenage Pregnancy Strategy was a failure.

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Parents-to-be wanting to find out their baby’s gender can be assured that a blood test on the mother gives an accurate result, say scientists.

The tests, which look for foetal DNA in the mother’s blood, are sold privately in many countries, including the UK.

Yet few studies, until now, have scrutinised how well they perform.

US experts examined over 6,000 test results and found it was reliable 98% of the time – providing it was used after the seventh week of pregnancy.

Anything earlier than this made the test unreliable, the Journal of the American Medical Association reports.

And urine-based tests appeared to be unreliable altogether.

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A “worrying” number of mothers are dying during pregnancy and childbirth in Britain because women are having babies later and receive substandard care in hospitals, leading doctors have warned.

Failures in identifying preventable and treatable medical problems and wrongly putting the health of babies over that of mothers has led to a rise in deaths, it is claimed.
Experts are calling for an increase in the number of obstetric physicians and better training for GPs to counter the trend.
Catherine Nelson-Piercy, professor of obstetric medicine at King’s College London, said a rise in the number of “high risk” pregnancies, including older and obese mothers, has fuelled the problem.
While the overall number of deaths has decreased since the 1950s, there has been a rise in the number dying from conditions not directly caused by pregnancy – which represents a “worrying trend”, she said.
The leading cause of maternal death is heart disease while the second is neurological disease.

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Doctors are failing to identify underlying health issues such as asthma and diabetes, say specialists

Increasing numbers of women are dying in childbirth in the UK because of an underlying medical problem that has not been spotted, a group of senior doctors has warned.

Six obstetrics specialists say the latest expert survey in the UK “highlights a worrying trend in the causes of maternal mortality in the UK” and that many deaths are caused by substandard medical care.

The death rate has dropped dramatically since the 1950s, when women used to die frequently of pregnancy and birth complications, such as haemorrhage and ectopic pregnancy (where the fertilised egg develops in the fallopian tube instead of the womb). But this fall has masked a rise in deaths from other causes such as asthma, epilepsy, diabetes and heart failure, that should have been detected and dealt with before the birth.

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Women are dying needlessly from conditions that develop or worsen during pregnancy because of a shortage of specialist doctors.

Maternal deaths caused by conditions such as heart disease, asthma and epilepsy have doubled in the past 20 years, the British Medical Journal reports.

Britain has only five obstetric physicians – specialists who treat pregnant women – and the BMJ says there is an urgent need for more to be trained. Professor Catherine Nelson-Piercy, the co-author of the BMJ article and an obstetric physician at Guy’s and St Thomas’s Foundation Trust in London, said the failure to train specialists meant the seriousness of seemingly minor symptoms such as chest pain, breathlessness and headaches were often missed.

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Kelly Brook speaks out for the first time over pregnancy heartbreak

Kelly Brook has spoken for the first time about her tragic miscarriage, describing it as ‘the hardest, most terrible time in my life’.

The model, 31, lost the baby girl she was expecting with rugby player Thom Evans in May when she was five months pregnant.

Kelly says she has spent most of the past few months holed up in her Kent home dealing with overwhelming moments of sadness, guilt and loss.

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Parents-to-be can now add their unborn children to their Facebook profile as family members.

Facebook members have been able to add other members of their family to their profile for some time but the new option allows the addition of an unborn child.
A spokesman for the social network said: “We develop new features, in part, by seeing how people use the service. For years, people have been using Facebook to share the joyous news of expecting a child and, a few months ago, we began testing a feature designed to make that process easier..”
The feature allows the parents to add a due date and even name the child.
It’s been suggested that the change is an attempt to stop people creating profile pages for their unborn children. Facebook’s rules state that all users must be at least 13-years-old.

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Women with a history of anorexia or bulimia may take longer to get pregnant, according to new research.

A study of more than 11,000 women in the UK found 39.5 per cent of those with a history of anorexia and bulimia took longer than six months to conceive, compared with 25 per cent of women in the general population.

They were also more than twice as likely as women without a history of either disorder to need treatment to help them conceive (6.2 per cent versus 2.7 per cent).

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Hannah Waterman has given birth to a baby boy with boyfriend Huw Higginson.

The 36-year-old actress welcomed her first child in recent weeks with her The Bill star beau.

The former soap star surprised fans when she announced earlier this year she was expecting a child with Higginson. The couple had been quietly dating since last summer after a long friendship going back 10 years

The pregnancy came as somewhat of a shock to Waterman and Higginson’s estranged spouses.

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Los Angeles’s IDEA World Fitness Convention offers up-and-coming techniques a chance to gain wider appeal in one of the hottest fitness markets in the world, Southern California.

While Zumba, Pilates, and Kranking all got their start at trade shows such as IDEA, this year a few fitness newcomers – including a workout for your myofascial tissues and a post-pregancy fitness plan – hope to make their way into a gym near you.

Among the hundreds of classes, IDEA offers only 16 specialized training courses for fitness professionals, and alongside ever-popular Zumba and indoor cycling courses is fitness expert Lisa Druxman’s Body Back technique, a fitness program to help a new mother “get her body back” after pregnancy. Along with fitness training, the program comes complete with nutritional guidance, online support, and inspiration.

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In India, I’d be a hero of the maternity ward, but in Britain, the Smogs (‘Smug Mothers of Girls’) are waiting to pounce.

For the past week I have been breaking the news to friends, colleagues and the men at the local corner shop that I am not (just) getting fat: I am pregnant again.
Modern mores dictate that you only go public with a pregnancy once you’ve had a 12-week scan, confirming that you’re not being neurotic, there really is a baby in there, and it’s healthy enough to stick. If you pay £100, you can have your scan at a private clinic with modern art on the walls, Molton Brown soap in the loos and super-turbo scanning machines which can detect, two months earlier than most, what sex your baby is. This one, I’m told, is a boy. My third.
In India, I would be the toast of the maternity ward: a boy-making machine, one-woman progenitor of the patriarchy, churning out tomorrow’s captains of industry instead of burdening the family with the expense and worry of girls. In Britain, however, the ancient prejudice in favour of sons has been turned on its head.

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More and more women are suffering from a stroke as a result of pregnancy, a study indicates.

The American study found the rate of hospitalisations from stroke during pregnancy had risen by 47 per cent between 1995 and 2007.
Over the same period the rate for those hospitalised due to stroke in the 12 weeks after birth rose 83 per cent.
However, the absolute risks of pregnancy-related stroke remain very small, according to the study, led by Elena Kuklina of Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, Georgia.
From 1995 to 2007 the risk of stroke during pregnancy rose from 15 to 22 in 100,000; while the risk in the 12-week period after birth rose from 12 to 22 per 100,000.

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Post your advice below. The best responses will be published in G2 next Friday

More than 40 years ago, when I was at university, my girlfriend became pregnant. We had decided to get married, but we both knew we did not want children. My girlfriend ended the pregnancy, and we remain married and happily child-free today. Neither family nor friends know. A few weeks ago, on TV a character talked in graphic terms about her pending abortion. My wife laughed out loud and said something like: “I just used lots of gin and strong laxatives!” Suddenly, I found myself in tears – and have come close to crying frequently ever since.

I don’t know why. Did my wife’s comment bring back memories I had buried? Was I crying for that unborn child who would now be 43? Was I crying at the memory of what the woman I love put herself through? Was I crying for the children we chose not to have? Perhaps I am crying because, as I get older, I realise how arrogant I was in my 20s by not wanting children?

The crying has to stop, but until I can make sense of what causes the tears, I cannot put it behind me.

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The high cost of surrogacy in Europe and the US means many Western women are outsourcing pregnancy abroad. Carolina, from Ireland, travelled to India to pay Sonal to carry her baby. The World Service’s Your World followed the two women as they came to terms with the emotional costs of the surrogacy.

Sonal, 26, has just given birth to a child she will never see.

“They took away the baby as soon as she was born,” she says. “I was unconscious when she was born so I didn’t even see her. When I woke up, I asked my mother what had happened, she told me it was a girl.”

Sonal, from the western province of Gujarat, has spent the past few months in the Akshanka clinic in the small town of Anand, away from her husband and young son and daughter.

Her husband is a vegetable vendor, earning up to 1,500 rupees (£21; $34) a month and his meagre salary is not enough to pay for the education she wants to give her children.

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Selma Blair has given birth to a baby boy.

The 39-year-old actress and her partner Jason Bleick welcomed son Arthur Saint Bleick into the world on Monday – 18 days past her due date – her representative has confirmed.

The baby weighed in at 7lbs 12oz.

Selma announced her pregnancy in January, but refused to reveal whether she knew the gender of the baby.

She said only: “I’m not going to say what it is yet. Hopefully, it’s one or the other.”

Prior to meeting clothing designer Jason 18 months ago,, the brunette beauty – who was married to musician Ahmet Zappa for two years – admitted while she was enjoying spending time with her girlfriends, she was still on the lookout for someone who made her feel good about herself.

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A generation of young women are delaying having children because they cannot afford a family, according to a report yesterday.

More than four out of ten working women in their 20s intend to put off having children because of ‘financial worries’.

Those now planning to wait until later for motherhood heavily outnumber women who have already had children in their late 30s or 40s.

The findings suggest the baby boom among older mothers will continue as younger women struggle to cope with the demands of careers, mortgages and finding a loyal and committed male partner.

Official statisticians believe that one reason for fast-rising birthrates is that women in their 30s and 40s are having the children that they put off when they were younger as they climbed through the education system and onto the career and property ladders.

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Children who were conceived through infertility treatment start school with speech skills up to eight months more advanced than those born after unplanned pregnancies, research suggests.

A study has found that pupils whose parents did not intend to have a baby lagged five months behind planned babies at age five, when their vocabulary was tested, and a further three to four months behind those born after IVF.

However experts say the findings are just down to the developmental gap between rich and poor in Britain. The differences in scores “almost entirely disappear” when family background is taken into account, since children born following assisted reproduction tend to have older, better educated and richer parents.

The paper, published online at BMJ.com on Wednesday, concludes: “Unadjusted analyses show that children born after unplanned pregnancy score poorly in cognitive tests compared with their planned counterparts, while children conceived after assisted reproduction do significantly better in tests of verbal ability.

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Our experts answer your questions on the dangers of flying when pregnant and exercises to lessen back pain.

Q My daughter is four months pregnant and is planning to fly to Australia next month to see her husband’s family. Is this wise/safe? I once had deep vein thrombosis, and she has low blood pressure like me. Carol Warman, Lincoln

DAN RUTHERFORD WRITES

Commercial air travel is considered safe in uncomplicated single pregnancies up to 36 weeks, and 32 weeks for multiple pregnancies.

Most airlines will refuse to carry a pregnant woman after those limits, so remember to base calculations on the return date. The middle third of pregnancy (weeks 13-28) is considered the safest time for a pregnant woman to fly, so that fits nicely with your daughter’s stage.

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A mother who was told by doctors to consider aborting her baby has spoken of her joy after he was allowed to leave hospital despite being born four months early.

Jacob McMahon became Britain’s most premature surviving twin after he was born on February 22, just 23 weeks into pregnancy, at a weight of 1lb 4oz.
Five months later he has now been deemed healthy enough to leave hospital with his mother Sara Fisher, 25, and father Scott McMahon, 26.
Doctors had advised Miss Fisher to abort Jacob after his twin sister, Emie, died when she was born at 21 weeks and six days due to an infection.
But Jacob followed eight days later, twelve hours before doctors would have demanded a final decision from the family on whether to terminate the pregnancy

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A study of the use of anti-nausea drugs by pregnant women suggests that they are safe.

The joys of pregnancy are mitigated for many by persistent nausea and vomiting. The cause remains obscure (though evolutionary theorists bizarrely claim it to be advantageous – “a defence strategy” to prevent the mother ingesting potentially harmful noxious substances).
Mothers are usually told they just have to stick it out – not least because of fears that anti-sickness medication may harm the baby. Certainly “alternative” non-drug therapies such as ginger, camomile and peppermint, together with acupressure (using the fingers to press key healing points) are preferred – if they work.
But, surprisingly, the worries seem to be misplaced. Dr Sheba Jarvis of London’s Hammersmith Hospital has investigated the use of drugs on pregnant women for a review in the British Medical Journal. She found that clinical trials involving 200,000 women comparing various drugs, including the antihistamines promethazine and prochlorperazine, with placebos confirmed their safety and efficacy. Indeed, they may even protect the foetus by minimising the metabolic disturbances associated with vomiting and improving the mother’s nutrition.

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She currently weighs around 120lbs and has a 24 inch waist.

But former Playboy model Jenny McCarthy has revealed she ballooned to 211lbs during her pregnancy with son Evan back in 2002.

The actress and philanthropist, now 38, posted this photograph on her Twitter page yesterday displaying her enormous bump. In the picture a smiling Jenny is almost unrecognisable as she lifts her blue hooded sweater to bare her heavily pregnant stomach.

‘For anyone who doubted my 211lbs at pregnancy here is a photo i found! Meaty meaty ass! Whoa!’ she wrote alongside the family snap.

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Her only cub, born in 2005 after artificial insemination, has moved to China

Mei Xiang has stopped letting zookeepers perform ultrasounds on her
If she is deemed infertile the National Zoo may swap her for another bear. Even a Chinese breeding expert couldn’t help giant panda Mei Xiang conceive.

She kept people guessing for months, but US National Zoo veterinarians determined on Friday that the bear had failed to become pregnant for the fifth year in a row.

Vets announced Mei Xiang was experiencing a pseudopregnancy over the past several months, which means she ovulated but did not conceive.

Animal keepers had high hopes and closely watching her behaviour and monitoring her hormone levels because she had been eating less, staying in her den and cradling objects the way she did before she gave birth once before, in 2005.

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Pregnant women using nicotine patches and gum to help kick their smoking habit are harming their unborn babies, scientists claim.

They say the addictive substance is absorbed by the foetus and this can cause high blood pressure and heart problems later in life.

American researchers suspect that nicotine causes harmful chemicals to form in the babies’ blood vessels while they are still in the womb.

These chemicals, known as reactive oxygen species, permanently damage the blood vessels so they are unable to function properly, which can lead to high blood pressure and heart problems.

Women who smoke are strongly urged to give up during pregnancy as the cigarettes harm the baby putting them at much higher risk of cot death, being born premature, deformaties and illnesses in childhood.

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Being stressed in pregnancy genetically programmes the developing baby to be more susceptible to anxiety and behavioural problems in life, according to research.

The link between stressed-out mothers and their offspring is well known, but this study has found the association is not just down to ‘nurture’ alone.
Researchers discovered that children of mothers who were the victims of domestic abuse while pregnant were genetically different, when it came to their stress response.
Helen Gunter and Thomas Elbert from Konstanz University in Germany found that maternal stress affected the development of the glucocorticoid receptor (GR) gene, which is critical in reacting to stress. The study is published in the journal Translational Psychiatry.

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When Lucas Hammond didn’t open his eyes straight after he was born, his parents weren’t too worried.

But doctors were baffled when, a day later, they still couldn’t prise his eyes open. It was the start of a long journey to find out whether Lucas will ever be able to see.

Specialists found that he was born with bilateral microphthalamia, a disorder meaning the eyes are too small after not forming fully during pregnancy, and cannot be opened properly. His parents Ashleigh Knox and Dave Hammond were distraught when doctors at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Gateshead told the couple their son could be blind.

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Concern about termination services is rising, with fewer doctors willing to perform the procedure, DoH says

Pregnant women could find it harder in future to obtain an abortion because of the growing number of doctors who are opposed to carrying out terminations.

A survey of medical students has found that almost half believe doctors should be allowed to refuse to perform any procedure to which they object on moral, cultural or religious grounds, such as prescribing contraception or treating someone who is drunk or high on drugs.

Abortion provoked the strongest feelings among the 733 medical students surveyed, according to the study in the Journal of Medical Ethics. “The survey revealed that almost a third of students would not perform an abortion for a congenitally malformed foetus after 24 weeks, a quarter would not perform an abortion for failed contraception before 24 weeks and a fifth would not perform an abortion on a minor who was the victim of rape,” said researcher Dr Sophie Strickland.

Source: GUARDIAN>> Read full article and comment

Almost half of today’s medical students say they would object to carrying out an abortion on a baby with congenital abnormalities later than 24 weeks in pregnancy.

According to the poll, nearly one in three (29 per cent) would refuse to carry out such an abortion at all, if they were in such a position.
Abortions after 24 weeks are only legal if the developing baby is determined to be at “substantial risk” of “serious handicap” in life.
There have been almost 18,000 such abortion since 2002, a handful for matters as minor as cleft palate and club foot.
The survey of 733 students in Cardiff, London and Leeds, also found that almost half of them (45 per cent) believed they should be able to refuse to give medical treatment that ran against their ethical or religious beliefs.
They were asked about their willingness to carry out 11 medical practices, including providing abortions at various stages of pregnancy, contraceptive services, and treating those who were drunk or high on drugs.

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It makes me cross to be accused of sponging

I need to date a single dad who’d understand me. When Joanne Watson learned that her 15-year-old daughter was pregnant earlier this year, she confesses to feeling shock and disappointment — but not for the reasons you might expect.

Never mind the struggles that her daughter would face as a teenage single mum; Joanne was jealous that it was her daughter expecting a baby and not herself.

‘I’d just done a pregnancy test of my own and it was negative. I came downstairs and that’s when Mariah said she had something to tell me,’ Joanne says.

‘I somehow knew immediately that she was going to tell me she was expecting a baby, and it was the last thing I wanted to hear after doing my own test. I said: “I don’t want to know.” But there was no avoiding it. We went to the doctor’s and she was eight weeks gone.’

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For Lucy Lord and her husband Alex, the birth of their healthy son, Oliver, should have been the joyful start of parenthood. There had been no hints of any potential problems during the 23-year-old’s pregnancy.

‘It was my first child, but there were no issues until I went in for the delivery. I was two weeks overdue, but that’s not unusual for a first child,’ says Lucy.

Her waters broke at 9am, but her son was not delivered for a day and a half. During that time, Lucy suddenly developed the dangerous high-blood pressure condition, pre-eclampsia. I started to feel strange. I told my husband I could see silver worms. I don’t know whether they were a hallucination or the result of a problem with my vision,’ she says.

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Maternal asthma ‘significantly increases’ the risk of pre-eclampsia, while infants born to mothers with the condition are much more likely to have a low birth weight, a study has found

Pregnant women with asthma have been advised not to panic after new research linked the breathing condition to a much greater risk of health problems in the baby and woman.

Asthmatic mothers-to-be are at “significantly increased” risk of developing dangerously high blood pressure or their child being born prematurely as a result of their breathing difficulty, the study found.

“Maternal asthma significantly increases the risk of pre-eclampsia [high blood pressure in pregnancy] by at least 50%,” report the Australian and American co-authors in BJOG: An International Journal of Obstetrics and Gynaecology, published on behalf of the UK’s Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists.

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Jayne Hughes struggled to look her obstetrician in the eye as she faced him across the consulting table, feeling sheepish and embarrassed after confessing she was pregnant again.

Jayne was expecting her fourth baby. Significantly, if this pregnancy were to progress, it would mean her going through a fourth Caesarean.

After the birth of her third child, Benjamin, three years earlier, doctors had strongly advised Jayne not to have any more children because by that point she had been through three Caesareans already — which is regarded as the accepted ‘safe’ upper limit.

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Pregnant teen who goes out drinking five nights a week (but says she’ll stop when her bump starts showing)

A pregnant 19-year-old who goes out drinking five nights a week says she pretends she has morning sickness when she is so hungover she is sick.

Holly Piggott, who drinks up to 32 units every week – the recommended number of units for women who aren’t pregnant is 14 – says she is worried her friends will think she’s ‘boring’ if she stops going out.

She still goes clubbing every Saturday and Sunday, and goes to the pub three times a week, but says she will start drinking at home instead when she starts having to wear maternity clothes.

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Candid Jessica Alba on the downside of motherhood

As she awaits her second child, Jessica Alba can’t help but marvel at the miracle of pregnancy.

‘I saw how incredible and amazing it is to be a woman and to be able to create a life,’ the 29-year-old says of welcoming her first child Honor, now three.

‘There’s a reason why certain areas of the body are desirable – because it all leads to reproduction,’ she says.

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Women with poorly-managed asthma have a higher chance of giving birth early or having a small baby, a review of evidence suggests.

Experts in Australia and the US also found a link with other complications, including pre-eclampsia.

They say women with asthma should be monitored at least monthly during their pregnancy.

An asthma charity said mums-to-be should also eat a balanced diet and not smoke.

The researchers looked at asthma studies involving more than a million pregnant women published between 1975 and 2009.

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When doctors reassured Jennifer Foreman her unborn baby would not weigh more than 8lb she hoped she could trust their judgment.

But after putting on a staggering five stone during the course of her pregnancy, she was right not to be so confident.

Her son Christopher eventually entered the world at a thumping 13lb 2oz – the weight of the average three-month-old – making him one of Britain’s biggest ever newborns. Miss Foreman heard a cracking sound in her pelvis at the start of her six-hour labour and told doctors she feared the baby was too big, but carried on delivering her son naturally.

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Smoking while pregnant significantly increases the risk of serious birth defects including missing and deformed limbs, according to a new report.

Scientists examined 172 research papers published in the last 50 years to carry out the first comprehensive review of the physical effects of tobacco on newborn babies.

They found that smoking while pregnant increased the risk of having a baby with missing or deformed limbs by 26%.

The risk was raised by 28% for clubfoot, 27% for gastrointestinal defects, 33% for skull defects, 25% for eye defects, and 28% for cleft lip or palate.

A condition called gastroschisis, which causes parts of the stomach or intestines to protrude through the skin, carried the highest potential risk.

Smoking while pregnant increased the likelihood of giving birth to a baby with the condition by 50%.

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Women who smoke while pregnant should be aware that they are increasing the chance their baby will be born malformed, say experts.

The risk for having a baby with missing or deformed limbs or a cleft lip is over 25% higher for smokers, data show.

Along with higher risks of miscarriage and low birth weight, it is another good reason to encourage women to quit, say University College London doctors.

In England and Wales 17% of women smoke during pregnancy.

And among under 20s the figure is 45%.

Although most will go on to have a healthy baby, smoking can cause considerable damage to the unborn child.

Missing limbs

Researchers now estimate that each year in England and Wales several hundred babies are born with a physical defect directly caused by their mother’s smoking.

Every year in England and Wales around 3,700 babies in total are born with such a condition.

The experts base their calculations on 172 research papers published over the last 50 years, which looked at maternal smoking and birth defects.

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Clubfoot and missing limbs among malformations in newborns proven to be associated with expectant mothers who smoke

Doctors are urging mothers-to-be to give up cigarettes after new research linked smoking in pregnancy to babies suffering birth defects such as clubfoot, missing limbs and deformed limbs.

Those who smoke while expecting a baby increase the risk of their child being born with a serious malformation by as much as 50%, the study found. The disclosure led to calls for new measures to reduce what the authors called “staggeringly high” levels of smoking among pregnant women.

Although smoking by pregnant women has already been linked to a higher risk of a woman having a miscarriage or her baby being born prematurely or having a low birth weight, 45% of women under 20 do so while one in seven is still a smoker when she gives birth.

The authors from University College London said their paper was “the first comprehensive review to identify the specific birth defects most associated with smoking.”

They reviewed 172 research papers published in the past 51 years covering 174,000 cases of birth defects. They concluded that for women who smoke while pregnant “the risk was increased by 26% for having a baby with missing or deformed limbs, 28% for clubfoot, 27% for gastrointestinal defects, 33% for skull defects, 25% for eye defects and 28% for cleft lip/palate.”

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A baby girl amazed doctors when she was born looking like she was performing the can-can.

Imogen Scully was born with her left leg in a high kick position favoured in the popular chorus line dance.

Her strange leg position baffled doctors – and it stayed up in the air for a week after she was born, to the amazement of her mother Lara.

Miss Scully, 38, who lives in Brighton, said: ‘I’d never seen anything like it before and neither had the doctors.

‘Her leg was right up in the air by her head when she was born as if she was doing the can-can.

‘Then it stayed in the air in that position for another week.

‘Everytime I tried to pull it down into a proper position, it would flip straight back up to her head.

‘I was beginning to think that it would never straighten itself.’

Miss Scully, who has a son Ryan, 11, had a straightforward pregnancy and nothing strange appeared on her scans at 12 weeks and 20 weeks.

When she went into labour in August 2009 she went straight to the Royal Sussex County Hospital in Brighton because her previous delivery had only taken three hours.

Miss Scully, who is a full time mother, said: ‘I had only been in labour for a few hours before Ryan had been born so I didn’t want to be caught out, so I got to hospital quickly.

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She’s heavily pregnant and looks ready to pop but that isn’t stopping former Spice Girls star Mel B from wearing super-high heels.

However, the 36-year-old star, who is expecting her third child, is finding her pregnancy ‘humps and bumps’ are proving slightly problematic in doing up the straps on the shoes.

So Mel has enlisted the help of husband Stephen Belafonte to aid her in ensuring the shoes are on nice and tight. Mel posted a picture on her Twitter page showing her sitting in a chair with producer Belafonte laying on the floor doing up her extraordinarily high gold sandals.

She accompanied it with the caption: ‘My humps my bumps will not allow me to fasten my own shoes,so this is how I do them!!!’

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