Let's Stop Fat-Shaming Pregnant Women (Oh, and Age-Shaming Too)

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Let's Stop Fat-Shaming Pregnant Women (Oh, and Age-Shaming Too)

A Huffington Post article this week makes the long-overdue case that doctors need to stop fat-shaming pregnant women who suffer from obesity or are simply overweight. In a nutshell:

"The reality is that the vast majority of overweight and obese women have perfectly normal pregnancies. But medical professionals are not immune to society’s tendency to disrespect fat people," as Brianna Snyder writes in the HuffPo article, titled "Fat-Shaming the Pregnant: How the Medical Community Fails Overweight Moms."

What does that disrespect look and sound like? Bullying women into believing that they'll be required to have a C-section if they don't lose weight. Frightening plus-size women into thinking they're risking their lives just by becoming pregnant. Asking them to abort the baby, lose weight, then get pregnant again. The horrors go on.

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Here's the Latest Idea for Renaming the Dreaded "Advanced Maternal Age"

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By Salma Abdelnour Gilman

An article on NBC's 9News.com headlined "Can I have Kids After 35? And Other Mom Questions Answered" doesn't have much to offer in the way of insights. Spoiler alert: The answer to the headline question is, "Research has shown that women are having babies later in life." So... this gives you a sense of the level of hard-nosed, ear-to-the-ground reporting we're dealing with here. But there are two intriguing takeaways from the article:

1) "Women with more children have less teeth." This is weird. But it's apparently a "FACT" (all-caps), according to the aforementioned 9News.com.

2) There's a better alternative to "Advanced Maternal Age," and it's... are you ready? "Waited Until I Could Handle It Moms." Not entirely accurate, since certainly not everyone waits on purpose, but we could get used to this one. WUICHIM is the acronym, and it's already growing on us. Bye forever, AMA?

Photo by Maurice Schalker via Unsplash.