Pregnancy and Pills
 Berman Institute Director,
Ruth Faden,
joins colleagues Maggie Little and Anne Drapkin Lyerly in leading the Second Wave campaign to secure fair benefits from medical science for pregnant women. An article discussing the campaign,
Pregnancy and Pills
, appears in Time Magazine (June 8) and is currently available online.
According to author, Bonnie Rochman, when she first heard about the Second Wave Workshop she thought, "...this makes a lot of sense. As a mother of three, I have my own memories of how anxiety-provoking it was to not know whether a drug was safe to take during pregnancy. It's a disservice to women, and I was excited by the idea of doing what I could to get this issue some attention."
The Second Wave Workshop was organized to make progress in a challenging area. Each year, hundreds of thousands of pregnant women in the US face significant medical illness during their pregnancies. Diabetes and hypertension complicate 40,000+ pregnancies; psychiatric illness complicates an estimated 500,000; cancer and autoimmune diseases are not uncommon, and yet we have surprisingly little data about how to safely and effectively treat these conditions. The pregnant body can substantially change the ways in which drugs are metabolized; and concerns about the safety of taking medication must be balanced against the medical risks — to woman and fetus alike — of undertreating significant medical disease. Participants also included Berman Institute faculty members: Nancy Kass and Steve Goodman
See also:
A Custom Drug
New York Times Op-ed, May 10, 2009 By Ruth Faden, Anne Drapkin Lyerly and Maggie Little
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