Tagged: Pregnancy

Just off from a circle of cushioned chairs, behind a privacy screen, Jessica Densmore greets patients inside a Cheshire Medical Center conference room, in Keene.

“Let’s take a listen and see if we can hear this baby today,” she says, positioning a fetal heart monitor.

Today’s mothers, ten in total,  are all between 22 and 29 weeks pregnant. They come once a month, and then every two weeks as due dates approach, for their Centering Pregnancy appointment: basically a group check-up.

Since 1970, the average age of first-time parents has increased markedly, from twenty-one years-old to twenty-five. Now, many parents wait even longer to conceive, and science makes it possible with advances in fertility treatments. A new era of freedom for women and men looking to have children later in life is now more a reality than a possibility, and the consequences are becoming more apparent.

Hospitals, advocates, and even formula manufacturers acknowledge that when it comes to newborns, “breast is best.”  And yet free samples of formula are ubiquitous inside many hospital walls – offered by nurses, doctors, or thrown in goodie bags for new mothers heading home after giving birth.  Now, some hospitals are calling for an in-house ban on free formula samples.  They say the relative ease of bottle-feeding may sway new nursing mothers to give

Saturday, Nov. 3 – Moth Radio Hour 1209