The complete illustrated guide from conception to birth. The Pregnant Body Book is a comprehensive visual guide to every aspect of conception, pregnancy and birth exploring the important changes that take place in a completely revolutionary way. State-of-the-art images, extraordinary photography and accessible text track each stage of both the mother and baby's development from fertilisation to birth week-by-week. This unprecedented guide covers everything you could possibly want to know from the science behind sex and conception to the intricacies of genetics and includes a detailed look at the anatomy and physiology of both the male and female reproductive systems and the groundbreaking medical advances that define the 21st-century understanding of pregnancy. The Pregnant Body Book is the first of its kind and an ideal reference for prospective parents, as well as both medical and midwifery students.

Despite reliance on ingredients like horse dung, Old English remedies for women’s medicine speak to contemporary reproductive concerns. Previous translators reduced the remedies to a general category of women’s medicine, but sustained examination of language reveals important distinctions: remedies for menstruation indicate social concerns about fertility, where remedies for ‘cleansing’ do not provide a clear path to conception, but rather foreclose it. Rarest of all are the remedies for childbirth, but their rarity is compounded by the practices of translators who conflate the language for women’s reproduction into an amorphous singularity. Through an original method of hysteric philology—the combining of traditional philology with contemporary feminist and medical epistemologies—this book situates itself in the historical treatment of reproductive people as both objects and subjects of medical practice, and gestures forward in time to the contemporary struggle for bodily autonomy.

Follow the amazing journey of the earliest stages of human life, with month-by-month development shown in unprecedented detail. The complex concepts and processes of emerging life are demystified with clear, jargon-free text, while exclusive 3-D images, extraordinary photographs, and detailed illustrations illuminate every aspect of human pregnancy. The largest section of the book examines the development of the baby in the womb and the parallel changes in the mother's body. Special 3-D art, illustrations, scans, and photographs show exactly how a baby changes and grows during pregnancy and how the female body adapts to carry it. A section on labor and birth explains these processes with step-by-step illustrations and easy-to-grasp text. The Science of Pregnancy also looks at the nature of human pregnancy, including how it evolved, and explores the anatomy and physiology of both the male and female reproductive systems. The mysteries of DNA and genetics are unraveled and explained in clear, illustrated detail, including patterns of inheritance and the interplay of genes and environment. Also provides straightforward, illustrated information on possible problems before, during, and after birth.

The first fertility-boosting guide to feature the cutting-edge research results on fertility from the Nurses’ Health Study More than 6 million women in the United States alone experience infertility problems User-friendly, medically approved advice clearly explained in 10 nutritional guidelines from two of Harvard Medical School’s top voices in nutrition

Are girls entering puberty earlier than they used to? This question, which has been debated recently by doctors and scientists in the pages of Time magazine and the New York Times, proves that there is still a great deal to learn about women's reproductive health. Female Fertility and the Body-Fat Connection is the record of one scientist's groundbreaking and decades-long work on the connections among fertility, body fat, and reproductive health in women. Rose E. Frisch explains here how, in women, a certain amount of body fat is crucial to the reproductive system and sexual maturation. Women who are too lean are infertile and cannot conceive children; young girls who are too thin have a delayed onset of their first period. Female Fertility and the Body-Fat Connection illuminates how and why a "critical fitness" level underlies a woman's reproductive health. In the process Frisch gives readers a comprehensive view of the research done to date on the relationship between body composition and fertility and also describes her own journey as a woman scientist working to advance her critical-fitness hypothesis both to the general public and the scientific community. Frisch answers the questions every woman has about the desirable weight for health and fertility and even includes tables to help women find their own best weight. She also demonstrates how important diet and exercise are for the long-term reproductive health of women, and shows what factors influence the onset of puberty in girls. Each milestone of the reproductive life span is affected by food intake and energy output, the factors affecting the storage of fat. Female Fertility and the Body-Fat Connection is a cornerstone to understanding the health of girls and women.

Welcomed as liberation and dismissed as exploitation, egg freezing (oocyte cryopreservation) has rapidly become one of the most widely-discussed and influential new reproductive technologies of this century. In Freezing Fertility, Lucy van de Wiel takes us inside the world of fertility preservation—with its egg freezing parties, contested age limits, proactive anticipations and equity investments—and shows how the popularization of egg freezing has profound consequences for the way in which female fertility and reproductive aging are understood, commercialized and politicized. Beyond an individual reproductive choice for people who may want to have children later in life, Freezing Fertility explores how the rise of egg freezing also reveals broader cultural, political and economic negotiations about reproductive politics, gender inequities, age normativities and the financialization of healthcare. Van de Wiel investigates these issues by analyzing a wide range of sources—varying from sparkly online platforms to heart-breaking court cases and intimate autobiographical accounts—that are emblematic of each stage of the egg freezing procedure. By following the egg’s journey, Freezing Fertility examines how contemporary egg freezing practices both reflect broader social, regulatory and economic power asymmetries and repoliticize fertility and aging in ways that affect the public at large. In doing so, the book explores how the possibility of egg freezing shifts our relation to the beginning and end of life.

Comforting and intimate, this “girlfriend” guide to getting pregnant gets to the heart of all the emotional issues around having children—biological pressure, in-law pressures, greater social pressures—to support women who are considering getting pregnant. Trying to get pregnant is enough to make any woman impatient. The Impatient Woman’s Guide to Getting Pregnant is a complete guide to the medical, psychological, social, and sexual aspects of getting pregnant, told in a funny, compassionate way, like talking to a good friend who’s been through it all. And in fact, Dr. Jean Twenge has been through it all—the mother of three young children, she started researching fertility when trying to conceive for the first time. A renowned sociologist and professor at San Diego State University, Dr. Twenge brought her research background to the huge amount of information—sometimes contradictory, frequently alarmist, and often discouraging— that she encountered online, from family and friends, and in books, and decided to go into the latest studies to find out the real story. The good news is: There is a lot less to worry about than you’ve been led to believe. Dr. Twenge gets to the heart of the emotional issues around getting pregnant, including how to prepare mentally and physically when thinking about conceiving; how to talk about it with family, friends, and your partner; and how to handle the great sadness of a miscarriage. Also covered is how to know when you’re ovulating, when to have sex, timing your pregnancy, maximizing your chances of getting pregnant, how to tilt the odds toward having a boy or a girl, and the best prenatal diet. Trying to conceive often involves an enormous amount of emotion, from anxiety and disappointment to hope and joy. With comfort, humor, and straightforward advice, The Impatient Woman’s Guide to Getting Pregnant is the bedside companion to help you through it.

This volume provides an investigation of the dynamics of reproduction. Using reproduction as an entry point the authors examine how cultures are produced, contested, and transformed as people imagine their collective future in the creation of the next generation.

Conceiving Agency: Reproductive Authority among Haredi Women explores the ways Haredi Jewish women make decisions about their reproductive lives. Although they must contend with interference from doctors, rabbis, and the Israeli government, Haredi women find space for—and insist on—autonomy from them when they make decisions regarding the use of contraceptives, prenatal testing, fetal ultrasounds, and other reproductive practices. Drawing on their experiences of pregnancy, knowledge of cultural norms of reproduction, and theological beliefs, Raucher shows that Haredi women assert that they are in the best position to make decisions about reproduction. Conceiving Agency puts forward a new view of Haredi women acting in ways that challenge male authority and the structural hierarchies of their conservative religious tradition. Raucher asserts that Haredi women's reproductive agency is a demonstration of women's commitment to Haredi life and culture as well as an indication of how they define religious ethics.

Prospective parents learn how they can lay the foundations for a healthy, happy family life even before their children are conceived. This guide shows parents how they can optimize children's physical, emotional, and spiritual health. Illustrations.