Maternal Stress
Jan. 14th, 2020 04:49 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ysabetwordsmith ... damages infant brains. Well, duh. It also runs up the rate of miscarriage, complications of pregnancy/childbirth, and maternal death.
Doctors are all flibbering about how to fix this. I imagine their efforts will amount to pestering women who are already stressed to be less stressed. I sincerely doubt they will do anything concrete to fix it like:
* Oh, you can't afford to move from your studio apartment to a 2-bedroom one so the baby can have a nursery? No problem, here is free public housing to fix that.
* You're too exhausted to keep working? Okay, here's a year of paid maternity leave you can start at any time.
* Yes, it's sad that your baby has a health problem, but all the care will be covered.
* I see that you don't have any relatives or close friends to help you take care of the baby. Don't worry, we have volunteers to help you with that.
It isn't a medical problem, and it's usually not an individual one either. It's a social problem in that America doesn't give a flying fuck about women in general or pregnant women in particular. There's little left of the social safety net. Of course women are stressed; they know they're on their own, and that's stressful. So if you want them to make happy little baby brains, maybe you should make life suck less. Otherwise, you don't get what you don't pay for.
Doctors are all flibbering about how to fix this. I imagine their efforts will amount to pestering women who are already stressed to be less stressed. I sincerely doubt they will do anything concrete to fix it like:
* Oh, you can't afford to move from your studio apartment to a 2-bedroom one so the baby can have a nursery? No problem, here is free public housing to fix that.
* You're too exhausted to keep working? Okay, here's a year of paid maternity leave you can start at any time.
* Yes, it's sad that your baby has a health problem, but all the care will be covered.
* I see that you don't have any relatives or close friends to help you take care of the baby. Don't worry, we have volunteers to help you with that.
It isn't a medical problem, and it's usually not an individual one either. It's a social problem in that America doesn't give a flying fuck about women in general or pregnant women in particular. There's little left of the social safety net. Of course women are stressed; they know they're on their own, and that's stressful. So if you want them to make happy little baby brains, maybe you should make life suck less. Otherwise, you don't get what you don't pay for.
(no subject)
Date: 2020-01-14 02:08 pm (UTC)*fuming over the current state of human society, shared*
Yes ...
Date: 2020-01-14 07:50 pm (UTC)In any case, those who care about women are free to help the women in their reach. We may not be able to fix the big problems, but it's the everyday problem of too much work and not enough rest that does the most damage -- and that one we can address. Anyone can make a point of doing things for a pregnant friend or new mother. If enough people do that, it takes the weight off.
(no subject)
Date: 2020-01-14 02:41 pm (UTC)Well ...
Date: 2020-01-14 07:02 pm (UTC)I'm not sure whether it's necessarily "damage" the way it's generally considered, though. I suspect that it's simply a natural variation in possible design. It may be an alternate mode that can be activated by bad enough conditions, and we're seeing more because conditions are pretty bad. Certainly I can see some big advantages it has over neurotypical design, but the difficulty handling new situations makes it hard to see as more advantageous in times of doom and chaos. Some design-activation switches are based on advantage (like color phases) while others just are (like temperature-based sex determination in reptiles). More input would be required to discern that level of detail. But the fact that autistic people are dramatically better than neurotypical people at certain things disproves the claim that it is purely a disability. *shrug* Most people can't seem to tell the difference between super-senses and distorted senses either, and file all sensory differences under sensory processing disorder.
Regarding the vaccine schedule, I find it dangerously overblown and the business practices reprehensible, but I'm dubious of the connection with autism. I have yet to find any studies on the topic not done either by people who think all vaccines are good and should be forced on the unwilling or by people think all vaccines are evil, which makes the body of available data largely useless. I am more inclined to suspect a connection with the skyrocketing rates of autoimmune disorders. I haven't seen the kind of studies that would need to be done to pursue that inquiry, for example, whether the rates differ across countries with more or less routine medical care.
Re: Well ...
Date: 2020-01-14 08:30 pm (UTC)Just like there's a broad spread of symptoms of autism, I doubt there's a single trigger to cause it. There's lots of things that cause the same medical condition. Take my immune disorder, hypogammaglobulinemia: body stops producing antibodies. In my case, it's genetic. Probably had it all my life with poor antibody production, it just went into complete production shutdown in '09. A friend of mine with the exact same condition, hers was probably caused by genetic damage from exposure to nasty chemicals: she was a jet engine mechanic with the Air Force. It can also be caused by cancer. In my friend's case, she was an only child and her parents are deceased, so they can't do any family genetic testing to see if there's potentially any familial bad genes.
Re: Well ...
Date: 2020-01-15 06:51 pm (UTC)Re: Well ...
Date: 2020-01-16 07:58 am (UTC)Humans are also designed to live in nature. Interestingly, high exposure to nature greatly reduces the symptoms of autism, ADHD, and a bunch of other things generally classed as behavior or personality disorders.
Notice that many of the things autists react to the worst -- artificial fabrics, loud noises, fast-moving technology, chemical fragrances, food additives, etc. -- are things not found in nature and thus not things humans adapted to handle.