The pregnancy panic attack

Women come to Grauer and her colleagues concerned about everything — from symptoms, environmental toxins, tests and possible miscarriages to birth defects, diet, giving birth and more. In her opinion, the very worst contribution to pregnancy anxiety are some reality TV shows.

“The television programs ... show a birth and they say something like ‘Will Megan and her baby survive? We’ll find out right after this commercial!’ They create a lot of anxiety because they give women the impression that we’re all high-risk and the truth is that the vast majority of us are incredibly low-risk,” says Grauer. Those TV programs, some pregnancy books and magazines, as well as Web sites and blogs offering opinions disguised as fact seem to play on the pervasive societal fear that already exists, Grauer says.

After I spoke with a pregnant woman who told me she threw one pregnancy book across the room in disgust because it was filled with worst-case scenarios and instructions to walk on eggshells (not literally, of course; I’m sure that would present some kind of risk of transdermal food poisoning), I started researching a book of my own.

I learned that despite the “risky” tests, the possible perils of filling your car with gas or eating canned tuna, the recklessness of drinking a caffeinated beverage or taking an aspirin, the odds were overwhelmingly in a pregnant woman’s favor that around 40 weeks or so from conception, one way or another and mostly regardless of what she had or hadn’t done, the average pregnant woman would deliver a baby and that baby would be just swell.

I also discovered that once you saw the fetal heartbeat via an early ultrasound when you were around six weeks pregnant, your chances of miscarrying drop to just 2 percent. And that the majority of women, without killing themselves with exercise or crash dieting, are back to their pre-pregnancy weight (or at least within a few pounds of it) by the time their children celebrate their first birthdays.

But, truly, as much as it hurts for a writer to admit this, you don’t need a lot of books to calm your anxiety about pregnancy. Women who have newly passed over to the mommy side actually tell it best.

I recently spoke with one such woman who had lots of fears during her pregnancy — everything from weight gain, testing, whether she’d get varicose veins, you name it.

Now that she’s a mom, this is what she told me: “Most of what I worried about during pregnancy was stuff I dreamed up but never even happened — or if it did it wasn’t even a big deal. Now that I have my daughter, I think, what was I so worried about!? Look at her. She’s a miracle — just like all the other kids at the park or mall or Gymboree class.”

Amen, Sister. Or rather: Amen, Mother.

Victoria Clayton is a freelance writer based in California and co-author of "Fearless Pregnancy: Wisdom and Reassurance from a Doctor, a Midwife and a Mom," published by Fair Winds Press.

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