Myths about pregnancy without any scientific basis I'm sure you've ever heard, as the shape of the belly indicates the sex of the baby, or the burning means that the baby will be born with a lot of hair ... they are far from being banished.
Luckily they are not the main source of information for women who expect a baby, but pregnant women are also influenced by myths about pregnancy that, apart from health professionals, circulate in popular knowledge.
Pregnancy guides, gynecologists and midwives are the main sources of information for future moms, but recent research reveals that the cultural environment, "the mythologies of pregnancy" that circulate in their social environment and in the media also have weight .
The study, conducted by Danielle Bessett, Professor of Sociology at the University of Cincinnati, in Ohio (United States), has been based on interviews with 64 pregnant women in the New York metropolitan area from 2003 to 2006 in order to know women's expectations about pregnancy and how they are influenced by the cultural environment.
Many women take for granted assumptions they have seen on television, in real and fictional spaces, movies, advertisements, entertainment programs ... even if they do not recognize it at first. Others do not know how to explain very well where their beliefs come from what gestation had to be.
The beliefs that women have about pregnancy they would be built on several sources, but the study shows that these “popular” sources cannot be underestimated and medical professionals should take this into account in order to better guide and inform future moms.
And, although in general this mythology is harmless, it can affect the mother in some cases, for example, if she thinks it is bad not to feel nauseous and suffers some type of anxiety, or changes her diet by introducing some food that is not recommended ...
According to the author of the study (entitled “Expecting Embodiment: Pregnancy Symptoms and the Cultural Mythologies of Pregnancy”):
Pregnancy symptoms, inconvenient or debilitating, are not treated as side effects of pregnancy in our culture, but rather as an important connection to the fetus and the subjectivity of the fetus.
This study is also interesting in that it analyzes the possible causes of some symptoms or issues are very frequent in mythology and popular inventions (Here we leave you the ten most common myths of pregnancy) and others not.
In the first section would be the issues related to nausea, burning, anxiety or pain of childbirth ... In the second there would be issues that, either because they are more strange, or because they are taboo subjects, less talk about them: hemorrhoids, gases, nosebleeds ...
In short, we see that what we expect pregnancy to be is sometimes far from scientific evidence. And although in general these are issues that do not harm the pregnant woman at all, misinformation can lead to confusion that is transmitted from generation to generation, and doctors should take them into account.
