(180 Days to PreConception) Conceiving Confessions: Goals, Toxicity and the Inescapable 35

180 days until my husband and I move forward from preparing for trying to be pregnant to actively trying to be pregnant. Sometimes 180 days can feel like an eternity away and at other times it seems like it’s far too soon. That my 11,680 days on this planet haven’t been enough, and I need more time than 180 days can give me. While the women’s rights movement made strides for women in the workplace it didn’t resolve the pressures and list of things that women still in large part do for the home. With both parents now being required to work to survive, how can I ever be a fully present and good mother? It’s these fears – how can I work, finish my PhD, ensure my baby has a healthy diet, nurture my marriage, and clean the toilets all at the same time? This self-inflicted pressure creates a spiral of doubts, making 180 days seem far too soon. I question if I am too selfish with goals and ambition to ever feel fully ready for the humility demanded of motherhood. On the days when 180 days feels like too long to wait to conceive it’s driven by two surmounting fears.

1. That every day that passes I am exposed to more and more toxic substances that exist in my everyday products and life.

2. That the magic number of thirty-five is a line in the sand and that each year that you approach it the age-related pregnancy risks greatly increase.

While my mind feels scattered of wanting to talk about breast feeding, toxins and the placental barrier, my birth control journey to expanding upon the historical precedent to minimize women. This first this entry will focus on number 1 and the second dive into number 2. These two areas of concern are my focus, in an attempt to keep my stream of conscious coherent and from wandering too far resulting in an utter confusion and that what I am trying so hard to pull from my mind and soul to share with you will be missed.

A Little Story

My husband and I met in 2013 and had a desire to leave the “the biggest little city in the world” where both of us grew up and where I truthfully never quite felt like home. As we discussed packing the car and just driving until we found a new city to live in, I knew that I couldn’t just leave on a whim. I had paused my undergraduate studies at the University of Nevada, Reno after starting in chemistry and then switching to business and then realizing I hate business and would absolutely loathe working in accounting, which is where we met.

So, with leaving looming I asked for 2 more years in Reno and craved going back to finish my chemistry degree. At the time I had just learned about the devastation of the Pearl River in China from dyeing denim and wanted to learn more about the chemicals in our environment. After two years of long nights memorizing organic chemistry reactions, watching all the Khan Academy trying to make sense of physics, and cramming to get differential equations into my mind I earned my bachelor’s in chemistry and also picked up a degree in secondary education.

But I was so dissatisfied. In all these equations in all of the content to understand life at the microscopic level where was the connection to the destruction that is happening at the microscopic level. Where in our curriculum are we teaching chemists and chemical engineers to think beyond trying to make a product to dye jeans but to think about how that product could interact in the environment and when widely used in countries without the infrastructure or regulation to properly treat it. I wasn’t ready to be done with school, and I felt that I needed to learn more, and I definitely didn’t want to be a lab chemist making $35,000 a year and having to create chemicals that could very well hurt the world and people.

So, we began to prepare for our move. We brainstormed places that we would both be willing to live and that had a university where I could pursue graduate school. We came to a short list of Denver, Seattle, and Austin. We visited each of the cities and were happy letting the admissions offices decide our fate. As a first-generation college student, I will brag for a moment to maybe encourage someone, but when I was accepted to all three universities (YAY) the decision became a little harder. Based on financial support The University of Texas at Austin won. Then the preparations continued we had to travel again to Austin to find an apartment to live in. Then we had to clean out our little house, have garage sales, rent a moving van, coordinate with his parents to help the drive across the country and plot out places to stay that were also cat friendly.

The move was 6-months or so away but there was so much preparation going on long before moving day.

The Connection

In 180 days, my body needs to be ready that at anytime it could become the home for a baby, that on that day my body will not just be mine but will become the physical space to grow another human being. While I don’t quite know exactly everything that I need for this journey I am here I am at the beginning, and I know that a move in is coming, and I am ready to start doing the work to get ready to make move in day a success.

As a doctoral student studying at the intersections of science and health communication with a particular focus on women’s health and chemical risk from environmental and personal care products. What was most natural to me as my husband, and I began to talk about conception was to not only enjoy the beautiful intimacy that comes with talking about making a baby with your partner, but it has also become a curiosity that could only be quenched by a deep dive into the cool waters of a research journey.

I began by thinking about these four-big questions that I was curious about of which not all will be addressed now but that as I prepare for motherhood these guide my actions. Honestly, I would argue that motherhood starts the moment you begin to plan for your baby’s conception.

That the act of preparing your body to be their home is the very first act of mothering.

BIG QUESTIONS

• What is the impact of chemicals from products (cosmetics, household, fashion etc.) on pregnancy spanning from before conception, during pregnancy and into early development? Are there specific chemicals or classes of chemicals that pose a greater risk? Can these exposures contribute to long-term developmental harm?

• What is the role of hydration and nutrition on pregnancy spanning from before conception, during pregnancy and into early development?

• What proactive measures can women (and men) adopt to minimize exposures to chemical toxins on pregnancy spanning from before conception, during pregnancy and into early development? Are there lifestyle habits or interventions to reduce the risk?

• How can policymakers, healthcare providers, and individuals collaborate to implement policies that protect our health from toxic chemicals?
  

A lot of my concern on needing to thoroughly prepare the body comes from adjacent work on environmental pollution and climate change research. There was an aha moment I had a few years ago when looking into per or polyfluoroalkylated chemicals often referred to as PFAs or “forever chemicals”. These chemicals were originally derived during World War II related to the development of the atomic bomb. These chemicals have the unique property of being water, oil, and heat resistant. Predating this was chemical weapon research during World War I, scientists were fast at work developing chemicals that would kill and severely injure humans and to test this they used a lot of insects. WWI used a lot of chemical warfare, things like mustard gas which is an easily vaporized sulfur that creates a yellow cloud hanging in the air that causes the skin to severely blister. If you live through it, you have a very long and painful healing process ahead of you. As a result of the terror that chemical warfare brought the Geneva Protocol which officially prohibited the use of asphyxiating poisonous or other gases in warfare to mitigate the impact that these chemical agents could cause unnecessary suffering and have long-term impact on the environment was signed in 1925. Needless to say, World War II scientists were back at it again, but this time cleverly switched from the inorganic chemicals like sulfur to organic chemistry which all comes from simple carbon chains.

These new chemicals were also tested on insects and after the war a whole new industry with their sights set on wealth and total insect annihilation. This is when DDT, Aldrin (even more toxic than DDT) and Dieldrin (even more toxic than aldrin) were used at scale very rapidly in agriculture for insecticide treatments.

These chemicals all stemming from a simple carbon chain usually supplied from the fossil fuel industry became so widely used as insecticides that in 1962 when Rachel Carson published Silent Spring already every human being had these toxic chemical in their body because of how they moved up the food chain from planets, to meat to humans.

There is never a miracle chemical, and I truly believe that the lure of something so “effective” will always come at a price. The price in this case is that PFAs never go away they are in our planet and bodies forever. These chemicals are known neurotoxins and different variations can be more or less damaging. It was this trait of them that caught my eye. This was during the time when Jenny McCarthy and other celebs lead the movement of vaccines as the cause of autism. I could see why so many parents who have a child with autism would want an answer, would want a single thing that could be blamed. For me as a mother-to-be I also want that, I wish there was just one thing that I could avoid ensuring that my child wouldn’t have autism or other mysterious neurological disorders. I can also see how the chemical industry could just sit back while parents around the nation protested over vaccines.

That they were as happy as a clam to have everyone else blaming someone else, and that they will do everything in their power to not get attention about all the chemicals that they produce and are released into the atmosphere and in our homes that are neurotoxins. PFA’s are known neurotoxins and diseases like Alzheimer’s and autism are neurological disorders. These “forever chemicals” that are used on our food, to put our wildfires which we have more and more of because of our climate crisis, are used as a flame retardants for furniture and for children’s clothing, and are in cosmetics, to name a few of the places. PFAs bioaccumulate meaning that all of them that have ever entered our body will always be with us. With the risk of autism at 1/100 having to consider chemicals in my body as a risk to my child is a real issue and unfortunately it’s a lot more complicated than becoming an antivaxxer (Grose, 2020; Hoffman, 2019)

"We all live under the haunting fear that something may corrupt the environment to the point where man joins the dinosaurs as an obsolete form of life, and what makes these thoughts more disturbing is that our fate could perhaps be sealed 20 or more years before the development of symptoms." Silent Spring, Page 158

Chemical Health and Pregnancy

I know this is a lot, and if maybe you hated science or chemistry in high school and have avoided it your entire life this can feel like you are reading incomprehensible gibberish. I reassure you that my goal as we go on this motherhood journey together is to help to break down the science using not only the science background but pulling in how to best communicate from my degrees in secondary education, to a master’s in STEM education and my PhD studies in health communication. This isn’t to brag but, in an age, when anyone can have a platform, it is to reassure you that I am qualified to talk about this with you.

That your doctor is the best person to talk about the physiological development, but what I have found is that there is a gap of information related to chemical health risk. The Center for Disease Control in their planning for pregnancy post includes a section on “Lifestyle Behaviors” and lists smoking, drinking, and certain drug use, stress and abusive relationships and work or living with toxic substances. My heart felt excited when I first saw this and thought maybe my work is already done, but when looking through the list I think most women unless you work in an industry around these products would think I am good (CDC, 2023).

• I don’t directly work with formaldehydes (not knowing they may be on their clothes)

• I don’t work with pesticides (not thinking about how they might be getting into their food)

• lead and heavy metals that’s not for me (not realizing this could be in their cosmetics especially makeup products)

If you then continued your journey Johns Hopkins would similarly tell you to eat a healthy diet emphasizing plenty of fruits and vegetables and then right below tell you to avoid harmful substances like lead and pesticide (How to Prepare for Pregnancy, 2022). This led me to wonder on the impact of vegetables and fruit and if there has been a study on pesticides in them and a connection to pregnancy and development (which can now be an entire topic for another entry)? A third scan and this time trying to find tips and recommendations from a non-medical source, so I went with parents.com which added visiting the dentist but still did not have a focus on the risk from personal care products. It includes stopping smoking 30 days before pregnancy.

With cosmetics being likened to the new tobacco and that these chemicals pose a greater health risk than industrial or environmental pollution I am surprised at how little information exists urging women to reduce/ avoid cosmetics as much as possible during pregnancy, and while I wish we didn’t need to makes me excited to share my chemical health journey (Lee et al., 2023; Nicolopoulou-Stamati et al., 2015; Toxic Beauty (2019) - IMDb, n.d.).

Take a breath and let's pray.

God I enter with gratitude and thank you for my partner and for the opportunity to try to fulfill your will from Genesis 1:28 “ then God blessed them, and God said to them, “be fruitful and multiply; fill the earth and subdue it; have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the bird s of the air, and over every living thing that moves on the earth.” God, I have been asleep for too long so focused on myself that I was unaware of what was happening around me. I hadn’t looked up to see how people, complacent people just like me in positions of power have allowed toxic substances to fill your world. I am awake like a lioness now and am ready to change my ways to change the planet. I ask for your wisdom and strength on this journey for going against the norms can be difficult because questioning how things have always been is hard. God my friends might not agree, they might say well my Doctor didn’t tell me that but, God I operate under your authority and I feel in my soul compelled to work to detox from these chemicals and to be a steward by protecting other people, plants and animals from the hard of a polluted world. It is a big problem, and I can easily feel overwhelmed and think someone else will do the work but the change only happens when individuals change and then life by life we come together to change the world for good. I thank you God for your goodness and believe that if we repent you will restore our bodies and land. In Jesus name we pray.

With Love,

References

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Grose, J. (2020, April 20). When Did We Start Taking Famous People Seriously? The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/20/parenting/celebrity-activism-politics.html

Hoffman, J. (2019, September 23). How Anti-Vaccine Sentiment Took Hold in the United States. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/23/health/anti-vaccination-movement-us.html

How to Prepare for Pregnancy. (2022, February 8). https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/health/wellness-and-prevention/planning-a-pregnancy

Kourtney Kardashian responds to critics of her pregnancy at 44: “How could you question God’s plan?” (2023, October 13). TODAY.Com. https://www.today.com/parents/celebrity/kourtney-kardashian-criticism-pregnant-age-44-rcna120364

Learn about Specific Exposures during Pregnancy & Breastfeeding | NIOSH | CDC. (2023, May 1). https://www.cdc.gov/niosh/topics/repro/specificexposures.html

Preparing for Pregnancy: Your 3-Month Guide. (n.d.). Parents. Retrieved December 11, 2023, from https://www.parents.com/getting-pregnant/trying-to-conceive/ready-set-conceive/

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