What to Believe When You’re Expecting: A New Look at Old Wives’ Tales in Pregnancy

Obstetrician Schaffir delivers a well-researched, if surprisingly humorless, look at various folk beliefs around pregnancy and helps sort out the possible, the illogical (“Why would spicy food start labor?”), and the just plain strange. The book is smartly organized around stages of pregnancy and motherhood, going from conception to labor to breastfeeding, and briefly examines questions associated with each. Are dry beets, rice, and pomegranates reliable fertility aids? Is a baby’s gender associated with the father’s virility? Can chocolate make a baby’s disposition sweeter, and can a mother’s stress make it worse? Although Schaffir diligently shares a slew of superstitions and misbeliefs, as a physician and scientist he is careful not to encourage belief in most of the “remedies” or advice. Sex and dinner as inducements for labor might be pleasurable but “there is little evidence” that they actually work, he writes. The jovial author’s best advice to parents is to “take what nature gives them and love their baby no matter what,” rather than concern themselves with issues beyond their control—baby gender, for instance. A higher dose of levity, and perhaps a more visually interesting presentation than Schaffir’s blocks of uninterrupted text, would make this intriguing and informative survey an even more enjoyable reading experience. (Oct.)