Every year, over four million women give birth in American hospitals. In fact, pregnancy is the most common reason for hospitalization in the US. Most American women experience few complications, delivering healthy babies and remaining healthy themselves. This fact is attributed largely to America’s wide network of health service providers, which allows pregnant women numerous quality options for care throughout the nine months.
Extensive research projects have conclusively shown that America is one of the safest nations in which to be a pregnant woman. Elsewhere, even intended pregnancies can become dangerous in an instant. According to the World Health Organization, 99% of the mothers who die from pregnancy-related issues live in developing countries.
Common Early Pregnancy Complications
But even in the wealthiest country on earth, difficulties can, and do, happen. Over the last decade, severe pregnancy complications among American women have risen to almost double their level during the 90s. A study performed in 2012 by researchers at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that between 2008 and 2009, “there were 129 cases of severe complications for every 10,000 women who delivered in a hospital.” You can read more about the study on the Huffington Post here.
Problems during pregnancy are particularly distressing because they involve, and can endanger, more than one life. But most, if not all, of the following problems can be handled by health professionals, and many women who experience pregnancy complications go on to deliver perfectly healthy babies.
First Semester Pregnancy Complications
In general, the further along you are in a pregnancy, the less likely it is you will experience complications. Accordingly, the first trimester, which usually ends around 13 – 14 weeks after conception,
Ectopic Pregnancy
What Usually Happens: Every month, eggs are released from the ovary, ready to be fertilized. They travel down the Fallopian tube, where they meet sperm, if sperm are present. Then they continue to the uterus, and “implant” in the uterine lining.
What Can Happen: Ectopic literally means “out of place,” and ectopic pregnancies occur when a fertilized egg implants somewhere other than in a woman’s uterus. Usually, ectopic pregnancies happen when a woman’s Fallopian tube is damaged or crushed in some way. The fertilized egg can’t make it through, and implants in the tube itself.
Unfortunately, there’s no existing procedure that allows us to transplant an egg that has already implanted. For that reason, ectopic pregnancies can’t really be “fixed.” The only choice is to terminate the pregnancy.
According to WebMD, 1 in 50 pregnancies are ectopic. Follow the link to find the most common symptoms of an ectopic pregnancy.
Gestational Diabetes
What Usually Happens: In people without diabetes, a lot of your everyday energy comes from sugars in foods. These sugars are broken down into simple components, called glucose. A hormone called insulin helps your cells absorb glucose, and use it to keep you going.
What Can Happen: Rising pregnancy hormones, like progesterone and hCG, can make it hard for your cells to adequately use insulin. If your pancreas can’t keep up with your body’s demands for insulin, your blood sugar levels can get out of control.
For many women, these rising levels of blood sugar are fairly easy to treat. Medications might be needed, but with proper care, gestational diabetes can be managed. And usually, it goes away after you give birth. But your child is also receiving larger amounts of glucose than it knows how to handle. All this sugar forces a baby to produce more insulin, and it can gain weight quickly as a result. Some babies gain so much weight that they become macrosomic, which means they may be too large to exit through the birth canal naturally. Doctors often turn to cesarean sections to safely deliver macrosomic children.
Miscarriage
It’s not something many women talk about openly, but from 10 to 20 percent of all pregnancies end prematurely, in miscarriage. And the vast majority of miscarriages occur well within the first trimester, before 12 weeks. Most miscarriages are caused by random genetic abnormalities that can’t be predicted or avoided. In many cases, one of the two gametes (sperm or egg) will have the wrong number of chromosomes, and be unable to develop properly.
There are numerous factors that can cause a miscarriage, like age (women over 40 are twice as likely to have a miscarriage than those in their 20s), pre-existing genetic conditions, and certain medical conditions, like diabetes.
