What to Believe When You're Expecting

When a woman is pregnant, she may hear no end of old wives’ tales, folklore, and advice on what will affect her baby or what will help her pregnancy to go well. Schaffir reviews the origins and the variety of these old tales and advice, repeated generation after generation, and helps women decide which bits they can believe.

---

Pregnant women encounter advice from many directions about how to have a healthy pregnancy – not only from health care providers, but from relatives, friends, and the Internet. Some of these pieces of advice (on topics that range from inducing labor to telling the baby’s gender to improving breastfeeding) have been handed down from woman to woman for generations, and don’t appear in any medical textbooks. Dr. Jonathan Schaffir explores the origins of these old wives’ tales, and examines the medical evidence that proves which ones may be useful and which ones are just entertaining. On topics ranging from getting pregnant to the best way to recover from childbirth, the book settles the questions of what a woman should believe when she hears such advice.