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But Bombak and her colleagues argue the science is contradictory, with some studies showing little fetal risk or infant fatness linked with a mother’s bodyweight.

The researchers interviewed 24 mostly white, middle-class women in two mid-sized unnamed Canadian cities about their experiences while trying to conceive, while pregnant or while giving birth. The study was a pilot to a larger study now underway.

Many women had positive experiences. But many others also described being made to feel as if they were “disgusting” or unfit to be mothers. In an earlier paper based on the same interviews, one woman recounted a fertility doctor telling her, “Gals your size, OK, mortality rates are higher. So I go ahead and intervene, help you get pregnant here. Then you go down to (a birthing ward). And then, boom! Pulmonary embolism.”

The doctor who refused to remove the IUD likely believed it was the medically correct thing to do, said co-first author Deborah McPhail, an assistant professor at the University of Manitoba. (The woman eventually had the device removed by a doctor at Planned Parenthood.)

But, overall, women resented being viewed as “bad mothers, or bad potential mothers, because they were taking care of themselves the best they could, the way most pregnant women do,” McPhail said. “They said, ‘but I am exercising as much as I should be; I am trying to be healthy.’ And they felt that wasn’t being taken seriously.'”

“There was a real dissonance between the experience they felt they should have had, and the experience they did have. And there was just a lot of anger and a lot of sadness around that.”

National Post

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