Can stress cause a miscarriage?
I can hear it now "You're stressed because stress can harm your baby, so stop stressing."
What I can gather is that the day-to-day worries of pregnancy, birth and the general worry that you will be responsible for a whole other person (no pressure here) is par for the course so you probably don't need to get in a twist about it. Where it gets a little tricky is when you are a really stressed person by nature or if something really tragic happens to throw you for a real loop and even then we don't seem to be talking about the difference between an atom splitter and a porch banjo player.
A lot of the sites launch into what you should do to relieve your stress like go for massage, put yourself first, take some time off, etc. and I say "hell ya" to all of the above but shouldn't we all do this all the time? Isn't stress always bad for us? I don't want to get all philosophical here, but I put that up there with "breathing will make you old" – there's truth to it but there isn't a heck of a lot you can do about it. I think all these people should shut their pie hole and stop worrying pregnant ladies. Don't they know it can harm their baby?!?
search: stress and pregnancy, stress harming a baby during pregnancy
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These reason stress is bad for the baby (so I'm told) is because it raises your blood pressure. What that does to the baby, I don't know. I stopped paying attention after my doc said I could smoke to relieve my stress and that would do less harm to the baby than my stress/high bp. Lol. One evil replaced another. I kept it under 2 smokes a day the whole pregnancy and my daughter was born perfect. These years later she's completely healthy, tall and a perfect weight for her age, and gifted. Maybe I lucked out?
I'm not sure where I read this (I read a lot!) but I saw an article about pregnant women and stress. The article said that there were hundreds of women pregnant when the September 11 attacks occurred and many of these women lost family members in the attacks but there was not a record of any of these women having suffered a miscarriage. They went on to have healthy babies. Certainly nothing could be more stressful than what these women went through so I say don't sweat the small stuff.
Severe stress during key points in sex development (there are several) can also trigger transsexualism in the child. There are pivotal points where the brain and sex organs are being shaped, and if the mother is extremely stressed at these points it can cause her body to 'misread' the baby's chromosomes and make more estrogen for XY or more testosterone for XX, leading to a baby with a brain wired for the opposite generals. In studies they have actually been able to deliberately cause transsexual offspring in rats, cats, and dogs (medical ethics prevent them from trying with human babies). In humans, the percentage of children born, who will seek a sex change in adulthood, goes up dramatically just after a famine, or a war. There's been no conclusive study as to why some women respond to this trigger this way, while others go through the same stressors and go on to deliver perfectly average gendered children.
Opposite *genitals*, not 'generals'. I'm a dope.