The Pregnant Body Book looks at the nature of human pregnancy, including how it has changed through evolution, and explores the anatomy and physiology of both the male and female reproductive systems. The mysteries of DNA and genetics are unraveled and explained, including patterns of inheritance, such as hair or eye color. The Pregnant Body Book examines the development of the baby in the womb and the parallel changes in the mother's body, structured to follow the process week by week, and tracking every anatomical and physiological change in unprecedented detail. Specially commissioned artworks, illustrations, scans, and photography show exactly how a baby changes and grows during pregnancy, and how the female body adapts to carry it. The processes of labor and birth are explained with step-by-step illustrations and easy-to-grasp text. The Pregnant Body Book also includes a section on disorders provides straightforward illustrated information on problems that can occur before, during, and after birth. A must-have reference for mothers-to-be, students, and curious minds.

Despite reliance on ingredients like horse dung, Old English remedies for women’s medicine speak to contemporary reproductive concerns. Previous translators reduced the remedies to a general category of women’s medicine, but sustained examination of language reveals important distinctions: remedies for menstruation indicate social concerns about fertility, where remedies for ‘cleansing’ do not provide a clear path to conception, but rather foreclose it. Rarest of all are the remedies for childbirth, but their rarity is compounded by the practices of translators who conflate the language for women’s reproduction into an amorphous singularity. Through an original method of hysteric philology—the combining of traditional philology with contemporary feminist and medical epistemologies—this book situates itself in the historical treatment of reproductive people as both objects and subjects of medical practice, and gestures forward in time to the contemporary struggle for bodily autonomy.

Are girls entering puberty earlier than they used to? This question, which has been debated recently by doctors and scientists in the pages of Time magazine and the New York Times, proves that there is still a great deal to learn about women's reproductive health. Female Fertility and the Body-Fat Connection is the record of one scientist's groundbreaking and decades-long work on the connections among fertility, body fat, and reproductive health in women. Rose E. Frisch explains here how, in women, a certain amount of body fat is crucial to the reproductive system and sexual maturation. Women who are too lean are infertile and cannot conceive children; young girls who are too thin have a delayed onset of their first period. Female Fertility and the Body-Fat Connection illuminates how and why a "critical fitness" level underlies a woman's reproductive health. In the process Frisch gives readers a comprehensive view of the research done to date on the relationship between body composition and fertility and also describes her own journey as a woman scientist working to advance her critical-fitness hypothesis both to the general public and the scientific community. Frisch answers the questions every woman has about the desirable weight for health and fertility and even includes tables to help women find their own best weight. She also demonstrates how important diet and exercise are for the long-term reproductive health of women, and shows what factors influence the onset of puberty in girls. Each milestone of the reproductive life span is affected by food intake and energy output, the factors affecting the storage of fat. Female Fertility and the Body-Fat Connection is a cornerstone to understanding the health of girls and women.

Follow the amazing journey of the earliest stages of human life, with month-by-month development shown in unprecedented detail. The complex concepts and processes of emerging life are demystified with clear, jargon-free text, while exclusive 3-D images, extraordinary photographs, and detailed illustrations illuminate every aspect of human pregnancy. The largest section of the book examines the development of the baby in the womb and the parallel changes in the mother's body. Special 3-D art, illustrations, scans, and photographs show exactly how a baby changes and grows during pregnancy and how the female body adapts to carry it. A section on labor and birth explains these processes with step-by-step illustrations and easy-to-grasp text. The Science of Pregnancy also looks at the nature of human pregnancy, including how it evolved, and explores the anatomy and physiology of both the male and female reproductive systems. The mysteries of DNA and genetics are unraveled and explained in clear, illustrated detail, including patterns of inheritance and the interplay of genes and environment. Also provides straightforward, illustrated information on possible problems before, during, and after birth.

Welcomed as liberation and dismissed as exploitation, egg freezing (oocyte cryopreservation) has rapidly become one of the most widely-discussed and influential new reproductive technologies of this century. In Freezing Fertility, Lucy van de Wiel takes us inside the world of fertility preservation—with its egg freezing parties, contested age limits, proactive anticipations and equity investments—and shows how the popularization of egg freezing has profound consequences for the way in which female fertility and reproductive aging are understood, commercialized and politicized. Beyond an individual reproductive choice for people who may want to have children later in life, Freezing Fertility explores how the rise of egg freezing also reveals broader cultural, political and economic negotiations about reproductive politics, gender inequities, age normativities and the financialization of healthcare. Van de Wiel investigates these issues by analyzing a wide range of sources—varying from sparkly online platforms to heart-breaking court cases and intimate autobiographical accounts—that are emblematic of each stage of the egg freezing procedure. By following the egg’s journey, Freezing Fertility examines how contemporary egg freezing practices both reflect broader social, regulatory and economic power asymmetries and repoliticize fertility and aging in ways that affect the public at large. In doing so, the book explores how the possibility of egg freezing shifts our relation to the beginning and end of life.

The first fertility-boosting guide to feature the cutting-edge research results on fertility from the Nurses’ Health Study More than 6 million women in the United States alone experience infertility problems User-friendly, medically approved advice clearly explained in 10 nutritional guidelines from two of Harvard Medical School’s top voices in nutrition

Find balance and enhance fertility with whole food and whole plants Healthy babies don't just happen. The lifestyle of the prospective parents is a crucial factor in promoting fertility and ensuring a successful pregnancy. But the average North American diet is saturated with processed foods and environmental toxins are rampant—we must take responsibility for what we put into and onto our bodies to create optimum conditions for the childbearing year. Drawing on the author's own personal triumph over infertility, Conceiving Healthy Babies is a unique herbal guide geared to helping couples achieve balance in preconception, pregnancy, lactation, and beyond. Its individualized approach to fertility explains the importance of: Understanding, accepting, and celebrating our own bodies Basing our diets on organic, nutrient-dense foods that have been traditionally prepared Using whole plants in their original form for their medicinal benefits Packed with detailed information on hundreds of different herbs with a focus on their roles in building healthy babies, this comprehensive manual is a roadmap to wellbeing. The reference guide is rounded out by complete information on herbal use before, during, and post-pregnancy, and special attention is paid to supporting nursing and lactation. Whether you are have experienced challenges in conceiving or just want to ensure that your pregnancy is as natural and uncomplicated as possible, Conceiving Healthy Babies is an indispensable guide. Dawn Combs is an ethnobotanist and herbalist who apprenticed with Rosemary Gladstar. After resolving her own infertility diagnosis through whole foods and natural herbal remedies, she chose to specialize in helping women rebalance their bodies for fertility.