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Mayo Clinic Guide to a Healthy Pregnancy by Roger W. Harms

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


More of a reference book than a cover-to-cover book. I was still in the market for a month-by-month book when I initially grabbed this. It's fine for that, if brief. The real value is in the "decision guides," alphabetical symptom index, and complications discussions.

Which raises an interesting question for me. Every time I opened this book to look up heartburn or carpel tunnel or whatever, I always snagged on the word "healthy" in the title. It's just such a meaningless word in this context. Particularly considering that this book is over a third discussion of complications. I just kept asking myself what an "unhealthy" pregnancy is supposed to be? Presumably that would be a pregnancy "less healthy" than the reader's.

This was on my mind because of the thing – you know the thing – where a baby is born and there's that haha funny ablest joke everyone makes about ten fingers and ten toes. "Gosh we had a baby and it's not disabled, woo!" "Healthy" is usually the code word for that, in the absence of the joke. Given that there was a tiny – but familially controversial – chance that Hogwart would be born disabled, I spent a fair amount of time thinking about this. What would we say about her in that case? She would have ten fingers and ten toes, but there are lots of people who would not be able to say that she was healthy. Which is bizarre to me, because I consider myself to be quite healthy, which is apparently a radical act seeing as I'm disabled. Ironically, I think both my partner and I consider me – the disabled one – to be more healthy than my partner – the cancer survivor. The one time I articulated this in passing to a medical professional, I got nothing but bafflement back.

Anyway. Ranging far afield here. My point is only that this book, like many others, is selling this word "healthy." Which is fine, until you start thinking about the word and it collapses to meaninglessness. And, under that, a lot of fear and ablism.




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