Posted by My OB said WHAT?!?.
Dec
13
Posted by My OB said WHAT?!?.
“Since You’re Overweight, I Don’t Want You To Get Excited About This Pregnancy Because You’ll Probably Miscarry.”
“Since you’re overweight, I don’t want you to get excited about this pregnancy because you’ll probably miscarry.” – OB to mother at the first prenatal appointment
There are 32 comments to this post.
Is that even medically founded??!
And let’s say it is. You can’t think of a nicer way to say it?!
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Melissa Reply:
December 13th, 2011 at 10:41 am (Quote)
“you’ll probably miscarry”!!!!!!
No, not based in medical facts at all. (I don’t have enough specific knowledge to address this with numbers, but…) There could *possibly* be elevated risk of miscarriage due to some health condition the mother may have suffered from, but “teh FATZ” does not kill embryos. And miscarriage is certainly not the most probable result of pregnancy generally speaking, even when mother does have perhaps even severe health problems.
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jaed Reply:
December 13th, 2011 at 2:15 pm (Quote)
Is that even medically founded??!
Not in any way.
If you were to track down this doctor, I’m sure they’d say they only wanted to “scare” the OP about the “health consequences”, and that “exaggerating a little” was “only for her own good” to “give her an incentive” to “take control of her weight”.
This is the end result of doctors’ practice of making fat-shaming the center of any encounter with the medical system. It starts with “make sure to counsel them to lose weight!” and proceeds to “don’t bother to diagnose their ailment, just tell them they’re fat, then they’re sure to become thin!” and finally to this… this grotesque and mendacious cruelty.
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Kathryn Reply:
December 13th, 2011 at 6:04 pm (Quote)
Never heard the word “mendacious” before (could be I’m just ignorant) and had to look it up…I like it!
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jaed Reply:
December 13th, 2011 at 6:51 pm (Quote)
(“Mendacious” is the kind of thing my brain comes out with when I’m trying not to use bad language… otherwise, with something like this OB’s comment, I’d have to fall back on words like [redacted] and [censored] and even [removed for your protection]…. Argh!)
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Crys Reply:
December 14th, 2011 at 5:05 pm (Quote)
During my pregnancy I was informed that there is a higher percentage of miscarriage/stillborn with mothers in the morbidly obese category and that because of this, they would be doing extra monitoring. They even asked if they could use my results in a study of “morbidly obese” mothers in order to assist with trying to find a link between the higher than average miscarriage/stillbirth numbers. I was comforted by the fact that they were doing everything in their power to assist me through the pregnancy and were trying to be proactive and help others in the future.
OP’s doctor should take a lesson from mine. Being fat doesn’t mean you should be treated like any less of a person.
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…why doesn’t the doctor just come out and say what he/she is obviously thinking:
-I don’t approve of fat people
-I don’t approve of fat women getting pregnant
-I don’t like dealing with fat people
-being fat is so, so dangerous. All of my
fat patients who were magically “lucky”
enough to keep their babies are in danger of
spontaneously exploding any minute…and I
just can’t handle the stress!
Obviously this doc needs to crawl back under their rock and be under a permanent restraining order: no contact with real human beings, overweight or otherwise.
Can you imagine the “care” this OB would offer to an overweight pregnant woman? “Oh, it’s not worth treating that problem, because “teh FATZ” is going to kill you AND your baby anyway.” And preventive care, encouragement about healthy choices during pregnancy…can you imagine the tone of THAT conversation, if the OB even bothered, given his/her nasty assumptions?
The mom-blaming makes me livid. OP, I hope you went elsewhere and got respectful and medically appropriate care.
For what it’s worth, the fact that I’m overweight (by the scale, you’d never “see” it by looking at me) did not kill my babies. My recurrent miscarriages were most likely caused by a clotting problem, perhaps aided by low progesterone levels/high estrogen levels. Thank goodness I had a provider who actually did her job and looked for medical reasons and ran tests rather than making assumptions and putting the blame on me because, hey, it’s easier! A mom doesn’t need people hinting at her that *she* can magically kill the little embryo growing inside of her, just by ____(fill in the blank)____. We’re generally already hardwired to be super protective and hyper-vigilant as it is.
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Michelle of the Crunchy Infertile had this to say,
Dec 13, 2011 @ 12:24 pm (Quote)
Since you apparently don’t know shot from shinola, I don’t want you to get too excited about being my ob. You’re fired.
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Knitted in the Womb Reply:
December 13th, 2011 at 2:37 pm (Quote)
You win!
If only women would actually take this kind of an attitude. I listened to a woman tell of how her OB counselled her for her first 4 prenatals that she should abort because she had epilepsy…and she kept going to him. HUH??? Pro-choice/Pro-life issues aside…why would anyone continue to seek prenatal CARE from someone who wants to kill their baby? She had a 10% chance of having birth defects (some minor) due to the epilepsy. And a 90% chance of the baby being healthy…but hey, let’s ignore that and advocate for 100% death! BTW…her baby was quite healthy at birth.
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Veronica Reply:
December 13th, 2011 at 6:04 pm (Quote)
I can’t speak for anyone else, but here there is such a shortage of doctors that if you want to have one follow your pregnancy, you have to get the first appointment right when you find out you are pregnant.
Switching doctors doesn’t work, unless you are lucky enough to find a doctor to take you. (I have been trying to 12 years to find a GP willing to take a new patient, and nothing so far)
Midwives are pretty much the same.
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Knitted in the Womb Reply:
December 13th, 2011 at 7:24 pm (Quote)
Yes, my heart goes out to people who really have no choice of care provider! In my area there are 5 hospitals within a 30 minute drive that have LDR’s, and easily over 50 OB’s. Of course midwives…those are harder to come by. The closest midwife that you can pretty much count on attending your hospital birth is about an hour drive from me (though she does births at one of the hospitals close to me), and in two opposite directions there are birth centers with midwives. Homebirth midwives are also a long drive.
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I have had multiple miscarriages. Four 14 out of 16 I was not overweight and still had those miscarriages. So I lost more when an “average” weight then overweight. The pregnancies of two of my four kids Iwas overweight but I did not miscarry. My doctor looked at things like if my hcg was rising (and even if it was rising slowly, stayed optimistic) and what symptoms I was having instead of my weight at the time.
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decemberbaby had this to say,
Dec 13, 2011 @ 1:26 pm (Quote)
“Since you’re a douche, I don’t want you to get excited about this pregnancy because I’ll be changing care providers now.”
There, I fixed it!
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Lisa in Texas Reply:
December 13th, 2011 at 1:58 pm (Quote)
This!! If this isn’t a red flag for changing providers, I don’t know what is. If the pregnancy didn’t end in a miscarriage I’m sure the next comments will be, “I’m sure you will have GD and need a c-section because of your weight.”
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THIS is the biggest bunch of bullshit I’ve read all day and I’ve read quite a bit. Wowza.
If there is any scientific founding whatsoever in the belief that overweight women have a greater chance of miscarriage, then it is most likely based on the greater statistical chance of an overweight woman having an abnormal hormonal balance caused by such things as PCOS, a Thyroid issue, etc., which in turn causes miscarriages. HOWEVER how ’bout checking the lady before making said observation to see if she has such issues IF that is where your belief is based…
IF however it is not based on such things and is only based off your:
Bias+Stuff you read once in a science journal and then never bothered to look deeper into=
Just shut up now and leave before you do anymore harm to this woman.
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You’ve got to be kidding. I have had miscarriages at 155 lbs, 190 lbs, and 200+ lbs. I have had “sticky” pregnancies at 155 lbs, 172 lbs, 189 lbs, and 209 lbs. (Oh yeah, and I should weigh about 145 lbs. But PCOS and other various difficulties don’t help me there.) There’s some DATA, Dr. Dodobird! Numbers. See what you can do with them.
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Jenny Islander had this to say,
Dec 14, 2011 @ 1:03 am (Quote)
“You shouldn’t get excited, so I’m going to scare you half to death by telling you that you may be killing your baby right now. Because subjecting the mother to ongoing stress over the next nine months won’t hurt the baby at all.”
Idiot!
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The Well-Rounded Mama had this to say,
Dec 14, 2011 @ 3:00 am (Quote)
This the doctor mentally inflating risks around obesity and pregnancy.
Some research shows a higher miscarriage rate in women of size, BUT there’s a giant confounding factor there in PCOS. Many women of size have PCOS, and the hormone imbalances of PCOS can cause miscarriages. Does that mean obesity CAUSES the miscarriage, or is it another factor like PCOS?
Unfortunately, all many doctors do is see a risk associated with weight, mentally inflate that risk because of the hysteria over obesity and pregnancy, start assuming the risk is far greater than it actually is, AND conflating correlation with causation while they’re at it.
In other words, if it happens to a fat person, it MUST have been because of their fatness and nothing else. And therefore, it must also happen to nearly all fat people too. Duh.
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Jen @Plus Size Birth had this to say,
Dec 20, 2011 @ 2:48 pm (Quote)
This is horrific and another example of how plus size women are often mistreated by their “care” providers due to their size alone. Plus size doesn’t equal high risk!
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This makes me mad. All women have a risk of miscarriage, no matter their weight. I’m 36wks today and I’ve been dealing with similar comments since I moved back home to be near my family. From one member in particular. She has said things like, “Don’t get too attached to that baby, since you’ll probably lose it just like you did the others.” (I had 6 miscarriages before I lost weight, this pregnancy has been completely complication free)
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Kiesha Reply:
December 24th, 2011 at 12:13 am (Quote)
You are a good one….my family members know that I am not mentally stable and not to say anything to me that might get their feelings severely hurt. They may have tried me before I had kids, because I was much nicer then….but now that I am a mother, the only crap I have time for is the crap I find in my progeny’s diapers…..I-wish-you-would. And as for the doctor…..it is to ridiculous not to be true. I have np words and quite frankly am to disgusted to think about it.
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Add Your Comment.
RUN, OP. Run.
(Holy cow…how can stuff like that come out of a person’s mouth? That’s so horrible!)
All I’m coming up with here are four letter words.
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Eileen Reply:
December 13th, 2011 at 1:56 pm Eileen(Quote)
This pretty much sums up all that could come to mind. WOW.
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