This week, after 10 years of extensive and thorough scientific enquiry, researchers finally confirmed what many of us have known for years, that "preg head," otherwise known as "placenta brain" doesn't in fact exist, and that pregnancy does not turn women into ditzy absent-minded airheads. So it's official then, pregnant women aren't stupid after all: there goes yet another sexist and patronising myth.

The idea that "being with child" has some kind of negative impact on women's cognitive abilities seems to have originated from a 1997 study by medics at the Royal Postgraduate Medical school in London. After studying the MRI scans of just 10 healthy women, the good doctors concluded that women's brains shrink during pregnancy, and linked that shrinkage to pregnant women's complaints of forgetfulness and poor concentration. This time around however, scientists at the Australian National University in Canberra studied 2,500 women, and unsurprisingly came up with a completely different set of results. Not only did they find that there was nothing to support the original theory, they also discovered that far from reducing a woman's mental faculties, pregnancy appears to increase them, and what's more, these improvements are likely to be permanent.

Of course that's not to say that there's no explanation for why some women feel more distracted and less able to concentrate when they're pregnant; just that there's no physiological cause for it. Pregnancy can be both hugely stressful and incredibly exciting, and having what sometimes feels like an alien lodged in your abdomen is a pretty mindblowing experience in itself; it's no wonder that some pregnant women find themselves unable to focus on other, less important things during this time.

Considering that so much of the guidance and literature aimed at expectant mothers seems to assume that they're close to being brain-dead, it will be interesting to see if this latest revelation leads to any improvement in the way they're viewed and treated by those who've never been in "the family way. Pregnancy after all, is not only a time in a woman's life when completely random strangers will feel at liberty to touch her without permission, laying their hands on her stomach and asking inane questions like, "Blimey, how many have you got in there?" it's also a time when she'll find herself lectured and browbeaten like never before. From government ministers issuing contradictory edicts about what she can and can't ingest, to restaurant staff refusing to serve her alcohol with her meal, any woman opting to join the "pudding club" soon learns that her own wants and needs count for nothing, and as for decision-making, well, that's best left to the experts: isn't it dear?

This policing of pregnant women isn't just confined to those who are actually pregnant of course; nowadays any woman of childbearing age is considered to be in a pre-pregnant state (pdf), whether she plans to have a baby or not, and all are advised to behave accordingly. It's not enough that a woman has her own health to look after; she's also expected to think about the health of any future offspring, 20 years ahead of conception and sometimes long before she's even met the child's prospective father. And if she can't be relied on to act responsibly, that's soon taken care of: folic acid can be easily slipped into bread, along with whatever other vitamins and minerals the Food Standards Agency deems necessary for the health of those who aren't yet even so much as a twinkle in their parents' eyes.

Hopefully that's all about to change. Now that it's been scientifically proven that pregnant women are fully functioning, sentient beings just like everyone else, there's no justification for continuing to treat them like small children who need everything spelling out to them. Forget putting warning labels on bottles of booze, for example, these women have only got a bun in the oven, they haven't been lobotomised.