Prenatal vitamins work better when taken along with a healthy diet. They are only meant to be a supplement, and not a substitute for a proper diet. Never rely on prenatal vitamins for all your nutritional needs. Talk to your doctor about what foods you should be eating.
Be sure to keep an eye on your calcium. An expectant mother generally requires 1,200mg - 1,500mg of calcium on a daily basis. Most prenatal vitamins do not contain this amount, so you may need a calcium supplement in addition. (Many will only contain 250-500mg.) Calcium is certainly important in the development of your new baby.
No two prenatal vitamins are the same; and many may not provide any benefits at all. Recent studies show that a pregnant woman’s body does not necessarily absorb all of the nutrients provided by the vitamins, especially folate. Folate is extremely important in the baby’s prenatal development. The vitamin helps prevent birth defects like spina-bifida.
While prescribed vitamins are ideal, most of the same vitamins are available over the counter in stores. You may be able to save substantial money with a store bought brand. The most important things to consider are the ingredients in the vitamins, and whether they absorb quickly or not.
There is an easy test you can use to determine if the vitamins will be absorbed into your system. Put one of the prenatal vitamins into a cup of water. Wait ten minutes. If the vitamin is dissolved, or is very soft, it will be absorbed into your system. If the vitamin remains hard, it will probably pass through your system without depositing many of the nutrients it carries. This is important, so be sure to do this with any new vitamin. (I am NOT a doctor or rocket scientist, this is just plain LOGIC)
Finding the right prenatal vitamin may take a little trial and error, but the benefits are great. Just continue to keep in mind that you still need to maintain a healthy diet. The benefits of prenatal vitamins are enormous and highly recommended, but good nutrition is still better than any supplement. Remember, no vitamin is going to be exactly the same, but here is what most sources that I have found suggest (these will vary slightly):
4,000 and 5,000 IU (international units) of vitamin A
800 and 1,000 mcg (1 mg) of folic acid
400 IU of vitamin D
200 to 300 mg of calcium
70 mg of vitamin C
1.5 mg of thiamine
1.6 mg of riboflavin
2.6 mg of pyridoxine
17 mg of niacin amide
2.2 mcg of vitamin B-12
10 mg of vitamin E
15 mg of zinc
30 mg of iron
Women, Abortion, and Mental Health: Ah, Who Cares?
The American Psychological Association (APA) recently released a report that said there was no reliable evidence that a single abortion affected a woman’s mental health.
I am actually stunned that the American Psychological Association would even make the following statement: "There is no credible evidence that a single elective abortion of an unwanted pregnancy in and of itself causes mental health problems for adult women, according to a draft report released Tuesday by a task force of the American Psychological Association."
Have they ever talked to a woman who has had an abortion? By reading this report I personally would say NO. What is even driving this kind of nonsense reporting? How much money and resources were spent on this WASTE of a report? I have an idea: I would like the panel that did this report to contact Stacy Massey, President of Abortion Recovery InterNational, Inc. (I haven’t even spoke with her or asked, but I am sure she would love some volunteer help) and volunteer to take calls for one day and THEN tell me that their is no credible evidence that a single elective abortion of an unwanted pregnancy in and of itself causes mental health problems for adult women. (I call BULL!)
The report is really just a literature review. Well, it isn’t really a literature review. A lot of the psychological literature was dismissed as methodologically unsound. So, the report is really based on only a limited number of studies.
If the authors of the APA report decided that a study didn’t first pass a methodological test, it was automatically dismissed as unreliable and thrown out of the sample of studies they looked at. In “science,” you see, there’s nothing to learn from experience, instinct, or insight.
The APA report is somewhat reminiscent of what happened when an Australian doctor discovered that a bacterium (called Helicobacter pylori) caused stomach ulcers. For decades, accepted medical wisdom was that peptic ulcers were caused by stress and lifestyle. Whole chunks of peoples’ stomachs were surgically removed – sometimes repeatedly – in an attempt to cure them of ulcers. Sometimes that worked. All too often, it didn’t.
Doctors Marshall and Warren of Australia discovered the true cause of peptic ulcers and won a Nobel Prize for it in 2005. Their discovery is generally considered one of the ten most significant developments in medical history. Given the suffering and the radical, invasive treatments of the time, you would think doctors jumped at the chance to embrace a new explanation for stomach ulcers. They didn’t. Dr. Marshall was even ridiculed for his claims. Besides, many doctors said, he had not performed proper experiments. Until he did that (which involved great expense that research organizations were hesitant to underwrite given the skepticism), his findings were simply to be ignored. So the suffering needlessly continued for years.
Now let’s put this APA report in the proper context. Five of the six authors were women. Although we’re dealing with women’s mental health and it is certainly proper for women to be on a task force looking at the mental health implications of abortion, is this really the most objective group? You can find all five of them easily on the web and they certainly appear to be a fine group of professionals, but so were the ridiculers of Drs. Marshall and Warren.
One of the reasons those who are anti-abortion have a hard time with “health of the mother exceptions” to proposed laws against such heinous procedures as partial birth abortions is that “mental health” would constitute such an exception. Mental health is a notoriously amorphous notion. Much depends on the beliefs of the person performing a diagnosis, so it’s likely that a mother wanting an abortion will always be able to find a doctor who will sincerely testify that the mother’s (mental) health is in danger.
It might be helpful if each of the task force members who authored the APA report would come clean on whether they think a mother’s mental health would be negatively affected by carrying an unwanted baby to full term. Why? Well, if they think carrying an unwanted baby to term is mentally unhealthy, there would naturally be a tendency to think of abortion as not so unhealthy. Abortion, in fact, might even be therapeutic in their minds.
Actually, they do sort of come clean. Here’s a quote from the study’s conclusion. “[A]mong women who have a single, legal, first-trimester abortion of an unplanned pregnancy for nontherapeutic reasons, the relative risks of mental health problems are no greater than the risks among women who deliver an unplanned pregnancy.” Since women have abortions for nontherapeutic reasons, the authors must think many have them for therapeutic reasons. So the question is relevant. Would the task force’s members sign off on an affidavit to make an exception to a partial birth abortion ban for the sake of a mother’s mental health? If they would, a first trimester abortion would seem trivial to them.
That’s the other important piece of that quote. It is only talking about first trimester abortions. Given the parameters of the studies that are acceptable to the authors of the report, it is highly unlikely that any of the acceptable studies looks at women over a long period of time. So the studies are concerned with women whose only real physical manifestation of their pregnancy has been a few missed periods. And, they’ve not had years to consider their action. If they’ve borne other children, they might even initially feel relief for the lessened responsibility.
What of the day when mothers of first-trimester babies see pictures that look like these? What if these mothers find out that their first-trimester child had fingers and toes, and a discernible nose? What of these mothers’ mental health then? It just doesn’t look like the APA particularly cares.
I am actually stunned that the American Psychological Association would even make the following statement: "There is no credible evidence that a single elective abortion of an unwanted pregnancy in and of itself causes mental health problems for adult women, according to a draft report released Tuesday by a task force of the American Psychological Association."
Have they ever talked to a woman who has had an abortion? By reading this report I personally would say NO. What is even driving this kind of nonsense reporting? How much money and resources were spent on this WASTE of a report? I have an idea: I would like the panel that did this report to contact Stacy Massey, President of Abortion Recovery InterNational, Inc. (I haven’t even spoke with her or asked, but I am sure she would love some volunteer help) and volunteer to take calls for one day and THEN tell me that their is no credible evidence that a single elective abortion of an unwanted pregnancy in and of itself causes mental health problems for adult women. (I call BULL!)
The report is really just a literature review. Well, it isn’t really a literature review. A lot of the psychological literature was dismissed as methodologically unsound. So, the report is really based on only a limited number of studies.
If the authors of the APA report decided that a study didn’t first pass a methodological test, it was automatically dismissed as unreliable and thrown out of the sample of studies they looked at. In “science,” you see, there’s nothing to learn from experience, instinct, or insight.
The APA report is somewhat reminiscent of what happened when an Australian doctor discovered that a bacterium (called Helicobacter pylori) caused stomach ulcers. For decades, accepted medical wisdom was that peptic ulcers were caused by stress and lifestyle. Whole chunks of peoples’ stomachs were surgically removed – sometimes repeatedly – in an attempt to cure them of ulcers. Sometimes that worked. All too often, it didn’t.
Doctors Marshall and Warren of Australia discovered the true cause of peptic ulcers and won a Nobel Prize for it in 2005. Their discovery is generally considered one of the ten most significant developments in medical history. Given the suffering and the radical, invasive treatments of the time, you would think doctors jumped at the chance to embrace a new explanation for stomach ulcers. They didn’t. Dr. Marshall was even ridiculed for his claims. Besides, many doctors said, he had not performed proper experiments. Until he did that (which involved great expense that research organizations were hesitant to underwrite given the skepticism), his findings were simply to be ignored. So the suffering needlessly continued for years.
Now let’s put this APA report in the proper context. Five of the six authors were women. Although we’re dealing with women’s mental health and it is certainly proper for women to be on a task force looking at the mental health implications of abortion, is this really the most objective group? You can find all five of them easily on the web and they certainly appear to be a fine group of professionals, but so were the ridiculers of Drs. Marshall and Warren.
One of the reasons those who are anti-abortion have a hard time with “health of the mother exceptions” to proposed laws against such heinous procedures as partial birth abortions is that “mental health” would constitute such an exception. Mental health is a notoriously amorphous notion. Much depends on the beliefs of the person performing a diagnosis, so it’s likely that a mother wanting an abortion will always be able to find a doctor who will sincerely testify that the mother’s (mental) health is in danger.
It might be helpful if each of the task force members who authored the APA report would come clean on whether they think a mother’s mental health would be negatively affected by carrying an unwanted baby to full term. Why? Well, if they think carrying an unwanted baby to term is mentally unhealthy, there would naturally be a tendency to think of abortion as not so unhealthy. Abortion, in fact, might even be therapeutic in their minds.
Actually, they do sort of come clean. Here’s a quote from the study’s conclusion. “[A]mong women who have a single, legal, first-trimester abortion of an unplanned pregnancy for nontherapeutic reasons, the relative risks of mental health problems are no greater than the risks among women who deliver an unplanned pregnancy.” Since women have abortions for nontherapeutic reasons, the authors must think many have them for therapeutic reasons. So the question is relevant. Would the task force’s members sign off on an affidavit to make an exception to a partial birth abortion ban for the sake of a mother’s mental health? If they would, a first trimester abortion would seem trivial to them.
That’s the other important piece of that quote. It is only talking about first trimester abortions. Given the parameters of the studies that are acceptable to the authors of the report, it is highly unlikely that any of the acceptable studies looks at women over a long period of time. So the studies are concerned with women whose only real physical manifestation of their pregnancy has been a few missed periods. And, they’ve not had years to consider their action. If they’ve borne other children, they might even initially feel relief for the lessened responsibility.
What of the day when mothers of first-trimester babies see pictures that look like these? What if these mothers find out that their first-trimester child had fingers and toes, and a discernible nose? What of these mothers’ mental health then? It just doesn’t look like the APA particularly cares.
A Rumbling...
As despicable as medical overcharges are, it is good to know that not all of the media has chosen to ignore the pervasiveness of the problem. More and more journalists are taking notice, and more and more media outlets are printing stories the bring the truth to light. Let's hope these are the early rumblings of a much-larger effort to secure the rights of medical patients nationwide, including pregnant women and their children.
One such article, posted at MSN here (http://ping.fm/zkBJp), reports estimations that Americans are pilfered out of $10 billion annually by the medical industry. Fraudulent charges, overcharges, erroneous charges – they add up to a lot of money. And they come in surprising ways: newborn blood tests for a man undergoing hip replacement; or $129 for a “mucous recovery system” -- Kleenex to the lay man.
These infractions are outrageous and there's little accountability for hospital administrators who facilitate fraud. They devise plans to discourage dispute, encode cryptic medical bills, demand up front payments or payment before discharge and other tactics designed to make you pay their price, carte blanche.
You wouldn't go to a car dealer, hand over a blank check and tell them to give you whatever they think is best, would you? But that's what hospitals expect you to do. You don't get what you pay for – you get far less than you pay for. In fact, it is estimated that the average hospital stay results in overcharges of $1,300!
The MSN article lists ten ways to prevent hospital overcharges. Much of it has to do with demanding itemized billing, filing disputes, speaking with administrators, and generally jumping through hoops. Resources specific to helping pregnant women receive fair medical billing, handle disputes and hold hospitals accountable for overcharges are available at http://ping.fm/clKgn and http://ping.fm/ZXcRN
SBut some people are finally taking notice, but not yet enough. The more mainstream media reports on such atrocities, the more likely decision makers are to hear our cry. The rumble is low now, but it's getting louder. We will be heard, and we will get fair medical coverage, care and billing for pregnant women!
One such article, posted at MSN here (http://ping.fm/zkBJp), reports estimations that Americans are pilfered out of $10 billion annually by the medical industry. Fraudulent charges, overcharges, erroneous charges – they add up to a lot of money. And they come in surprising ways: newborn blood tests for a man undergoing hip replacement; or $129 for a “mucous recovery system” -- Kleenex to the lay man.
These infractions are outrageous and there's little accountability for hospital administrators who facilitate fraud. They devise plans to discourage dispute, encode cryptic medical bills, demand up front payments or payment before discharge and other tactics designed to make you pay their price, carte blanche.
You wouldn't go to a car dealer, hand over a blank check and tell them to give you whatever they think is best, would you? But that's what hospitals expect you to do. You don't get what you pay for – you get far less than you pay for. In fact, it is estimated that the average hospital stay results in overcharges of $1,300!
The MSN article lists ten ways to prevent hospital overcharges. Much of it has to do with demanding itemized billing, filing disputes, speaking with administrators, and generally jumping through hoops. Resources specific to helping pregnant women receive fair medical billing, handle disputes and hold hospitals accountable for overcharges are available at http://ping.fm/clKgn and http://ping.fm/ZXcRN
SBut some people are finally taking notice, but not yet enough. The more mainstream media reports on such atrocities, the more likely decision makers are to hear our cry. The rumble is low now, but it's getting louder. We will be heard, and we will get fair medical coverage, care and billing for pregnant women!
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