Pregnancy Dangers

I started doing some pregnancy reading last night when I got my weekly 'you are this many weeks' email, along with some article links. Through clicking, I got to one on the eating do's and dont's.

Listeria was a big thing that caught my attention. It wasn't a lot of new information to me, it was some of the comments left on the article that had me thinking 'wtf'.

Listeria:  food-borne bacteria. You can read up on it here. According to that link, it's 20 times more likely to hit pregnant women. It can kill you or make you seriously ill. Or for your baby? It could cause miscarriage, infection, premature birth, or stillborn birth.

You should avoid soft cheeses, raw seafood, undercooked meat and eggs, uncooked hot dogs or deli meats, wash your fruits and veggies and so on.

Anyhow, I've never had soft cheeses, tried raw seafood, and won't usually touch runny eggs. I like hot dogs but haven't had them cold since I was a kid. And I rarely eat deli meats even when I buy them, and now I know not to bother. So go me.

I can't find the exact article with the comments I was reading last night, but from memory some people were talking about how they ate some or a lot of those things and their babies are fine. Good for them. There are some pregnant women that were commenting saying stuff like "it's only 'this' likely, you can't worry about everything so I'm going to eat whatever". Really?

So it's not 100% likely. It's not like it's a mild case of food poisoning either. This could kill your baby.

If the chances of poison hurting your baby were low, would you feed it to them anyway? Why take the chance.

It all just seems crazy to me. Why do something if you know it has a chance of harming your unborn baby? 

[ via weheartit ]