We may not think about it a lot, but it’s almost magical that we can give birth to a whole new person all on our own. (Or, at least half of us can.) Pregnancy is a marvel of evolution and a pretty handy way to continue the survival of our species without having to rely on external factors. Imagine, say, having to depend on a bee to take your DNA to another person just so you could reproduce.

Despite being such an integral part of human life, though, there are still many interesting and lesser-known facts about pregnancy that come as a surprise to many. Here, we count down ten of the best of them so you don’t have to.

10 Triple-Parent Trials

We generally assume that the maximum and minimum number of people required for a pregnancy is two. Even if modern medical technology has made it possible to get your eggs fertilized by a sperm donor, we still need at least two people to make it happen and no more.

Some recent scientific trials, however, are out to challenge that assumption by using three people to make a baby, rather than the traditional two. While we’ve known that it’s theoretically possible for quite some time now, it was more in the realm of science fiction until the 2010s.

Known as mitochondrial replacement therapy, the procedure entails using mitochondria (and thus mitochondrial DNA) from a third parent to eliminate chances of a serious mitochondrial disease. The procedure has been mired in controversy due to its ethical implications, especially in the US, but a number of countries around the world are now going ahead with trials.^[1]

9 The 17-Month Pregnancy

As we all know, the average amount of time women remain pregnant falls somewhere in the vicinity of nine months. It’s not a precise number, and childbirth may be premature or delayed depending on specific circumstances, though the deviation is rarely more than one month, give or take.

A woman in China called Wang Shi was having none of that and decided to challenge nature itself by staying pregnant for 17 months (or so it was claimed by the People’s Daily). While pregnant, she was diagnosed with a condition called placenta previa, in which the placenta remains underdeveloped for an abnormal amount of time, delaying the delivery date. There have been other cases of the condition in the past, but none of them got stretched out to as long as 17 months. Surprisingly (and fortunately) the baby, born in August 2016, was healthy, with no underlying conditions due to the delay in birth.^[2]

8 Men Experience Effects Of Pregnancy As Well

Pregnancy is often thought of as a strictly female endeavor, even if men are involved in making it happen to a great extent. Once the baby is conceived, though, men have little biological role to play in the whole thing, unless you count providing emotional support to their partners.

According to some research, though, men may experience physical symptoms when their partner is pregnant, a condition known as sympathetic pregnancy. They could develop symptoms like nausea, abdominal pain, cramps, toothaches, and backaches during their partner’s pregnancy. Even if doctors and researchers have noticed this phenomenon for quite some time now, science doesn’t quite understand it. While it’s not a medically recognized medical condition at the moment, research into why it happens at all is still going on.^[3]

7 Taller Women Are More Likely To Birth Twins

The chances of giving birth to twins (or greater numbers of babies) are fairly slim. We currently have no way to directly control how many kids we have in one birth. If we did, many people would still choose to have only one, as every additional kid translates to added cost and responsibility (even if we’re sure parents of twins love them both equally).

As it turns out, though, there is at least one proven factor that could influence whether you have twins or not: being tall—at least for women. According to one study, taller women have a higher chance of conceiving twins. On that note, another study suggests that women who consume dairy products are five times more likely to have twins.^[4]

6 Double Pregnancy

You might think that the greatest number of pregnancies a woman can have at any given time is one, as that’s what science has told us. People certainly don’t continue to take contraceptives when they’re expecting, as they don’t expect another pregnancy to take place when one is already going on.

While that’s still largely true, there have been rare cases in which women got pregnant when they were already pregnant. You see, when a woman gets pregnant, her body is supposed to switch off ovulation to provide the unborn baby with all the resources it can get. A plug of mucus in the cervix should also prevent more sperm from getting into the uterus, the thickened lining of which should be difficult for another fertilized egg to attach to. In rare cases, though, those mechanisms don’t work for one reason or another, resulting in double pregnancy. Why exactly it happens is still a mystery, and more research is required to determine whether it’s due to some medical abnormality or just the female body feeling like doing something adventurous once in a while.^[5]

5 Orgasms During Childbirth As Painkillers

The female orgasm is one of the most mysterious parts of human sexuality, and we still have little idea about why it exists at all. It’s not always related to sex, either, as women have been known to orgasm from seemingly mundane things such as exercise, further deepening the mystery.

What most of us don’t know, though, is that some women experience an orgasm during childbirth, which may as well be the last place you’d expect it to happen. We still don’t quite get why it occurs, though instead of brooding on the mystery, some women in recent times have chosen to employ orgasms to dull the pain of childbirth.^[6]

Admittedly, it does involve some awkward maneuvers (e.g. masturbating during labor), but at least it helps with the overwhelming pain of delivery.

4 Pregnancy Causes Memory Problems

As many women who’ve been pregnant can tell you, it comes with its share of memory issues. Pregnant women are known to regularly forget where they’re going and to just generally space out while doing everyday things. What gives?

According to science, there’s a perfectly legitimate reason for it. Studies suggest that the hormones released during pregnancy may cause the brain to change in ways we don’t understand, and one of the effects is memory problems. While they can’t tell exactly which hormones are responsible for it—or why it happens at all—pregnant women have been found to be much worse at spatial memory tests than others. They also had higher anxiety levels and lower mood. To be clear, memory issues don’t affect all pregnant women, but the effects are especially pronounced among women who do experience them.^[7]

3 Nipple Stimulation For Inducing Labor

Listen to old wives’ tales or just search through the Internet, and you’ll find a lot of advice on how to manually induce labor in the last stages of a pregnancy. It may range from the intuitive “just have sex” to the absurd “eat a lemon,” depending on the veracity of the source you’re looking up.

As of now, though, there are very few scientifically proven ways to induce labor that we know of. One of them is stimulating the nipples. Much like most of this list, we’re not quite sure why it happens, as larger-scale studies are required to effectively understand the mechanisms behind it. A 2018 study by researchers in Japan found that late-stage pregnant women who stimulated their nipples for a total of one hour per day for three days had higher levels of oxytocin in their saliva.^[8] A bit over a third of them gave birth within 72 hours of the study.

2 The Baby Strengthens The Mother

A woman’s role as a mother starts long before the actual birth. Over a period of around nine months, her body makes sure that the baby has all the nutrients and immunity it requires before coming into the world, and everything that happens to it in the womb has longstanding effects on the baby’s subsequent life.

Their relationship isn’t exactly one-sided, though, as the baby also helps the mother in a variety of ways. For one, it activates the previously dormant parts of the body (like the mammary glands). More importantly, the baby also occasionally sends stem cells to repair damaged tissues and injuries for the mother, something that was suspected but not proven until recently.

Some research suggests that the fetal cells that get into the mother’s bloodstream may remain there for the rest of the mother’s life.^[9]

1 Babies Practice Emotions In The Womb

Thanks to evolution, our faces are incredibly good at expressing a wide variety of emotions through expressions. Facial features like the eyebrows, eyes, lips, and nose are capable of lending nuance to even the simplest of emotions, something we don’t think of in our day-to-day lives. Most of us may think that we learn how to control them a bit later in life, though according to one research, it all starts in the womb.

A study done by researchers from Durham showed that unborn babies are capable of making a lot of facial expressions in the womb, from the simple laughing and crying to the more complex nose wrinkling. It may be because they’re actually feeling those emotions, but the researchers believe that it’s actually the brain’s inbuilt mechanism to learn how to express various emotions once they’re born.^[10]

You can check out Himanshu’s stuff at Cracked and Screen Rant or get in touch with him for writing gigs.

We’ve all been there. Just starting to show, maybe four or five months into your pregnancy—you’re finally over that gosh-awful first trimester. Ugh, the morning sickness, the food aversions, the smells! Well, maybe you still have the smell thing going on. You know, all of a sudden, your husband’s cologne smells like a nauseating wet donkey. Okay, and perhaps we haven’t all been there. But for people who have borne children, the second trimester is the start of the mostly fun, kind of terrifying, food-filled adventure that is pregnancy. 

With an emphasis on food. 

Around 50%-90% of women experience food cravings during their pregnancy. Some of these cravings are food they already enjoy. Some are things they would never have dreamed of eating. My craving was a cupcake the size of my head with a ton of strawberry buttercream frosting—which I never did get. But some food cravings are so strange, so out-of-the-ordinary, so, for lack of a better word, gross, that only science—maybe—could explain it. Pregnant women get kind of weird. Without further ado and without judgment—despite the label of the article—here are the top 10 grossest pregnancy cravings.

10 Dirt

The craving for dirt during pregnancy is not uncommon. But just because the craving happens doesn’t mean women take a spoon to their flower pot. The brain certainly tells them, “Hey, it doesn’t seem like such a bad idea,” but hopefully, they refrain. The whole eating dirt thing is not so good for you.

Pica is the craving for non-food items that hold no nutritional value to the body. The word “pica” stems from the Latin for magpie. Magpies, though intelligent birds, will eat almost anything—fairly similar to pregnant people. People with pica have an insatiable craving for ice cubes or dry starches like cornstarch, dirt, paper, clay, laundry detergent, and charcoal. Though specialists don’t know the exact reason for it, they suspect that iron-deficient people are more at risk.

About 27%-68% of pregnant people suffer from pica, and its ill effects are pretty obvious. Those who ingest dirt or other chemical-based, non-nutritive substances may end up consuming toxic substances. This poses a risk both to the mother and the child. So though it’s funny to think of somebody pregnant digging into that bag of Miracle-Gro, it’s actually pretty dangerous.

9 Vinegar

You can wipe down windows with vinegar, remove foul odors from your Tupperware, make tasty salad dressings, and of course, brine cucumbers to make pickles. Vinegar is useful for so many things, even as a daily health regimen. But very rarely do you hear of people drinking straight vinegar—unless it’s midnight at a bar and you’re doing picklebacks with your very drunk friends. Obviously, you need more pregnant friends. They’ll gladly do picklebacks without the whiskey and are probably easier to deal with.

Sounds gross, but pregnant populations who crave straight vinegar are onto something. Pregnancy can result in morning sickness, aka nausea from h-e-double hockey sticks. For most, it settles down after the first trimester, but it can last the entire pregnancy. Because pregnant people can’t take any old over-the-counter medication to help with their nausea, they tend to look for holistic alternatives. One of those alternatives is apple cider vinegar.

Apple cider vinegar balances out your stomach’s pH, neutralizing the amount of acid sloshing around in there. Hard core people drink the vinegar straight, but it’s much more tolerable cut with some water and honey. 

Then there are those people who just want to drink the brine from the pickle jar. No nausea, just because. Straight-up savages.

8 Flamin’ Hot Cheetos Dipped in Lemon Meringue Pie

No, we didn’t just come up with this combo on the spot for the shock factor. We’ve known a lot of pregnant people, and this is just a crazy craving one of them happened to have. There are two layers to this craving that justify dipping the obviously manufactured hot Cheeto dusted crunchy thing—it could just be fried pasta, who knows?—into a goop that looks similar to vaseline. The first is spice. The second is sweet.

Both spice and sweet trigger the release of endorphins. Endorphins are the body’s happy hormones. Since pregnant bodies are constantly at odds with their fluctuating hormones, any chance at happiness is completely welcome—even if it’s in the form of junk food capsaicin and sugary calories. Unfortunately, spicy foods can upset anyone’s stomach, especially a pregnant person in the third trimester. You may have to stick to the lemon meringue pie.

7 Onions

Did you ever want to bite into a raw onion just to know what it’s like? I have. I’m not ashamed to admit that. No, I didn’t do it. But some pregnant people have! Craving onions, sauteed or otherwise, isn’t gross in itself, but the pungent nature of onions can result in some stinky breath. It’s a stink you can’t get rid of just by brushing your teeth, either. Once you invite onion breath into your home, it’s there.

Still, despite the odor, onions can be beneficial for pregnant people. Onions prove that your body knows best. It knows what it needs and signals you to eat things to fulfill that need, ergo, cravings. In the case of onions, they are full of quercetin, which helps aid the body’s immune system, and contains anti-inflammatory properties. They are also rich in key nutrients for pregnant women: vitamin C, B6, folate, and more.

So if you see a pregnant person biting into a raw onion like an apple, watch your gag response. They’re actually eating a strange sort of multivitamin. And giving themselves wicked bad breath.

6 Hot Dogs Out of the Package

Hot dogs are processed like bologna. It’s essentially deli meat in an intestinal casing. We usually eat them piping hot, wrapped in a fluffy bun, and topped with mustard and, for the controversial, ketchup. Sometimes, though, when you’re pregnant, you just want to eat it cold. Your body wants that iron, protein, and B-vitamins, even in this floppy, slimy, and who is anybody kidding, obscene form.

But no matter what you do, no matter how intense the craving, do not eat a “raw” hot dog. There’s a reason so many food restrictions are placed on pregnant people, and uncooked hot dogs are a really good example. Hot dogs are breeding grounds for Listeria. A pregnant body that contracts Listeria means potentially severe consequences for both the mother and child. 

But wait, aren’t hot dogs precooked before they’re packaged? Yeah, they are, but that means nothing. Even after processed and packaged, those little wieners can get Listeria. This is the same reason pregnant people should avoid deli meats. Listeria hot spots. It’s a gross fact of modern-day, Westernized eating, but true. Listeria is not fun and not worth indulging in a pregnancy craving.

5 Mayonnaise on Everything

For the “five golden rings” topic, we have mayonnaise. Personally, I don’t think craving mayonnaise is evil. Eating mayonnaise, unless it’s homemade, is safe for pregnant people as well. But there are plenty who think the condiment is one of the grossest things ever. 

Perhaps it’s the fact that it’s made from oil and eggs, or that it’s gloopy and makes an odd crackling noise when you spread it on bread? Or perhaps it’s because of its naturally euphemistic nature—who knows? But I guess that when you’re craving spoonfuls of it or putting it on anything you can chew, the craving does get a little out there.

One of the more popular applications of “pregnancy mayo” is with french fries. Some pregnant people like it on pizza. But why? Why put mayo on everything? A craving for mayonnaise during pregnancy could indicate the body’s need for increased stores of fat and calories. Pregnant people need to take in 500 extra calories on average. 

It could also be your body telling you to consume some vitamin K. A serving of mayonnaise has 25% of your required daily intake of Vitamin K. Vitamin K is essential for normal clotting and, therefore, safe labor.

4 A Mashed Potato Sundae 

Oh, this one sounds good! Except that it’s not really. Instead of substituting chocolate sauce with gravy, and a cherry on top for a side of cranberry sauce, this one uses caramel sauce. Yup! Mashed potatoes and caramel sauce. 

This gross combination comes from a book intended to appeal to pregnant people’s odd cravings. Mashed potatoes are a common pregnancy craving on their own. They are carb-loaded and easy to eat if you’re feeling queasy. Potatoes in themselves also have impressive levels of Vitamin C and B, important nutrients for the pregnant. 

But any potential health benefits mashed potatoes can provide seem to be offset by all that sugar. Eh, whatever, you’re pregnant and you deserve some caramel sauce over your…um…potatoes.

3 A Cottage Cheese Swirl

One pregnant Instagram user posted a picture of her craving that got all the “odd pregnancy cravings” lists talking. It is a cup of cottage cheese with a yellow mustard swirl. I mean, whatever floats your boat, but couldn’t you just say you drank mustard from the container instead? Anyway, let’s see why this combo would exist in the first place, starting with cottage cheese.

Cottage cheese, being a dairy product, is a great source of calcium. Someone who is pregnant should get at least 1,000 mg of calcium a day—the minimum recommended dosage for anyone. If you don’t meet this requirement every day, it’s not the end of the world, but since you’re growing a whole new set of bones inside of you, you should really try. The body is going to prioritize the growing baby’s needs so make sure you’re getting enough calcium for yourself, too.

2 Mustard

Mustard deserves its own category. And if you’re eating the condiment by itself, yeah, it’s kind of gross. Yes, pregnant people eat mustard by itself. Not all, silly, just the ones who are craving it! The second half of our combo mentioned above, mustard, despite being unfortunately paired with a chunky, creamy cheese substance, has some benefits for pregnant women.

Mustard seeds contain minerals like iron, copper, and manganese that help boost immunity. There’s also sulfur, which is a natural antibacterial. Another benefit to mustard is its anti-inflammatory properties and metabolism-regulating vitamins—folate for one. 

Those horse pills your OB/GYN tells you to take when you’re pregnant are full of folate. It’s a crucial vitamin during pregnancy and aids in your baby’s brain development. Adding a little mustard to your meal here and there can be a great way to help that along. And adding a little to your cottage cheese is enough to make the internet get morning sickness.

1 Hot Sauce and Milk

Whenever I think of milk as a craving, I think of that scene from “Anchorman” where Ron Burgundy is walking along the streets of San Diego on a sweltering hot day, depressed, and drinking a container of milk. “Milk was a bad choice!” Hot sauce is the equivalent of this hot day.

One woman on a women’s forum wrote that she used to go to Roy Rogers and ask for handfuls of hot sauce packets. She’d put the hot sauce on everything! On top of that, she’d drink a half-gallon of milk every day. Something to neutralize the spicy, I guess? Between the endorphins from the hot sauce and the calcium and fat intake of the milk, the combo must have totally satisfied a craving.

But at the same time, the idea of the two things mixing in her stomach just hurts mine.

How is it possible that the world population is over seven billion, yet most of what we think we know about pregnancy we either learned from played-out sitcoms or children’s books talking about how every life is a “miracle?”

If you didn’t know that the subject was pregnancy and overheard a doctor describing all the things that can and do happen to a mother’s body over the course of her baby’s development, you would likely believe you had stumbled across a new Stephen King audiobook, or crashed a brainstorming session for some kind of body horror film. The details of human gestation and birth are grim to the point that, if they were more widely known and understood, it is likely that the prophylactic market would dry up overnight as celibacy became the new normal.

The evolution of human female anatomy to require menstruation already put women in a rare and unfortunate club; other than primates, it’s just bats and the elephant shrew that have this contentious relationship with the moon. But it turns out that this is only the first of many Cronenberg-esque twists, just waiting to blindside mothers as they struggle through journey of pregnancy.

Unlike so many other obliging diseases, you don’t develop immunity to pregnancy after your first exposure; you just go into remission, vulnerable to a new bout at any time. And if the gift of life is supposed to be the payoff for nine months of hardship, bad news: many of the effects of pregnancy never really go away.

You’ll want to sit down before continuing, because the truth is, pregnancy is really less a beautiful miracle of life and more like a horrible plague, unmatched by almost any disease known to science.

10. Thinning of the Blood-Brain Barrier

In humans, the brain is sort of like an impenetrable fortress. An intricate network of blood vessels insulates the brain from the rest of the body, ensuring that essential nutrients (like oxygen) are able to pass through, but that just about everything else gets blocked (to get an idea of what a breach of this system looks like, consult someone with multiple sclerosis; and that’s just from having extra white blood cells enter the brain). This zealous security system is known as the blood-brain barrier (BBB).

Scientists have spent lifetimes trying to find ways to get medicine to penetrate this barrier to ensure life-saving treatments can be delivered to the whole body, preventing the return of cancer, as well as management of neurodegenerative disorders without having to perform literal brain surgery just to get medication where it is needed.

Warning labels chiding expectant mothers to avoid eating, drinking, self-medicating, or generally putting anything into their bodies other than happy thoughts and classical music are usually focused on how the developing fetus does not yet have its own operational BBB to keep toxins out of its young brain. Considering how active this system is in healthy humans, it makes sense that almost everything that enters the bloodstream is potentially toxic to the unborn. This is also why the Zika virus is such a catastrophic threat to the population: it can appear quite mild in healthy adults, but cause permanent developmental harm in fetuses.

We now know that this relationship is not one-way. During pregnancy, this system stops working normally in the mother’s brain as well.

In order to help the developing fetus get all the materials it needs, it appears the mother’s body compromises its own BBB, making it more permeable and thus vulnerable to the intrusion of non-essential components in the blood. Most of the time, the BBB still manages to get the job done. But recent research has shown that fetal DNA can migrate into the mother’s brain, and then remain there indefinitely, even following birth. This phenomenon, known as microchimerism, may be harmless, but in other cases may be responsible for the development of any number of conditions and autoimmune diseases later on in the mother’s life. Given its name (literally: tiny chimera), scientists are clearly inclined to believe the latter.

It does not appear to matter how long a pregnancy lasts, or whether it comes to term or is terminated early; since a fetus is really just a bundle of DNA and rapidly dividing cells, it is capable of infiltrating the mother’s BBB any old time and planting foreign DNA in her brain like a time bomb. Because these genetic sleeper agents can be activated at any time following pregnancy, it is difficult to screen for them or accurately predict what effect they might have later on.

Of course, even if we could, the BBB’s return to normal operations following pregnancy means it would be all but impossible to treat the microchimera with anything less invasive than brain surgery.

9. Permanent Hormonal Disruption

No self-respecting sitcom can resist the comedic goldmine that is the emotional pregnant woman. From the absent-minded bouts of “pregnancy brain” to wild fluctuations in temperament, the hormonal roller coaster of pregnancy is ripe for laugh tracks and bumbling, exasperated spouses.

In real life, personality changes resulting from hormonal disruption during pregnancy last a little longer than 20 minutes plus commercial breaks.

First, the upshot: studies suggest that women who have experienced pregnancy tend to possess superior memories and better overall mental organization than those who have not. This appears to be related to the boost in brain-developing stem cells from the developing fetus; as baby brains grow, they can lend a little extra neuroplasticity to the mother’s brain too. Neuroplasticity is the trainability of the brain, which makes it easier to change habits, learn skills, or adopt foreign languages, and normally peters out in adulthood.

Unfortunately, they make up for this gentle surge in brain power with an increased predisposition to neurodegenerative conditions like Alzheimer’s. Even more confounding, this neurological restructuring can impact the mother’s entire nervous system, changing the way her body responds to medication and especially hormonal therapy. This is particularly relevant when women enter menopause, the girls-only, reverse-puberty spectacular, for which hormone therapy has become a popular compensatory method.

Not only does hormone replacement during menopause make it a less taxing experience, it can help women mitigate bone loss and even uterine cancer. That is, if their bodies haven’t been too compromised by the hormonal fireworks that accompanied their pregnancy.

It is really more of a Faustian bargain than a divine transformation that turns women into mothers: they gain some extra brain power in the short-term, sure; down the road, though, their ability to respond to medication or remember their own names can disappear.

8. Chronic Pain

Modern society, with its endless variety of desk jobs, daily commutes, and binge-worthy television shows, has already given us plenty of ways to develop chronic back problems. Pregnancy takes all of these hazards and mechanisms for the slow degeneration of posture, and crams them into a crippling nine month window.

Of course, it is hardly surprising that the sudden weight-gain and changing physique that accompanies the later weeks of pregnancy can put a bit of a strain on the spine. What is surprising to many new mothers is that all these bodily changes don’t immediately–or sometimes ever–fully correct following the pregnancy.

Obviously, pregnant women are frequently identifiable by the round “bump” in their abdomens beneath which the fetus is growing. Less visible is the cascade of other physical changes taking place to accommodate this clump of new cells.

A particular hormone, helpfully called relaxin, plays a major role in helping the mother’s body prepare to give birth. As the name suggests, relaxin works by getting ligaments and tissues in the body to loosen, stretch, and otherwise relax. In the correct doses, relaxin helps the pelvis and cervix gain some elasticity, so that the baby can pass through without getting stuck, causing damage, or being damaged on its way out.

The effects of relaxin are seldom so concentrated and precise, however; this is why pregnant women also find their feet painfully swelling and contorting, making it hard to walk or wear shoes. This stretching and loosening can also cause the muscles and tissues of the back to slowly slip out of place and change shape. Expectant mothers compensate for all this by changing posture, adopting a new waddling gait, and training their bodies to accept this as the new normal.

Once all this relaxin dissipates and the pregnancy is over, women’s bodies have a hard time going back to their original shape, and have developed a new muscular memory that prevents them from simply standing up straight and walking with their original stride. That is assuming, of course, that their bodies generated the ideal amount of relaxin in the first place. Too much, and all this sagging, slouching, and shuffling can be even more pronounced during pregnancy, and even longer lasting afterward. Too little, and the entire pregnancy will be accompanied by severe pain as the body struggles to maintain its original shape.

7. Skin Problems

All that relaxin is still no match for the sudden abdominal swelling that makes pregnant women look pregnant. Naturally, that means stretch marks are all but guaranteed; they are difficult to prevent, and impossible to completely eliminate–no matter what the cosmetic company is trying to sell you.

While this is a fairly well-known feature of pregnancy, it is far from the only ill-effect likely to show up in the skin.

It is fun to say that pregnant women have a glow about them; it certainly fits the nonsensical narrative of the magic of maternity. In reality, they are more likely exhibiting chloasma, a sudden activation of melanin in the skin exposed to sunlight, making freckles and moles appear darker, and causing brownish blotches appear, especially on the face. It occurs in as many as three-quarters of all pregnancies, earning it the nickname, “the mask of pregnancy.” Although it is supposed to be temporary, it doesn’t always go away quickly. The beauty industry is happy to accommodate, of course, with all manner of chemical peels and laser treatments that do more harm than good in resolving chloasma.

Absent this change of complexion, women can still look forward to a healthy crop of skin tags, pimply, rice-like growths of excess flesh that may or may not die off after the pregnancy, and will definitely bleed profusely and possibly scar should they be cut or shaved off once they emerge.

Then there is always the chance of pruritic urticarial papules and plaques of pregnancy, also known as PUPPs and pregnancy rash. Unlike most of these side-effects, PUPPs doesn’t have many physical attributes other than itchiness, but routinely alarms women with its appearance. Of course, that fear may have to do with the fact that PUPPs can also disguise the incidence of other more serious skin conditions, ranging from a viral infection to scabies.

PUPPs is such a common condition that doctors generally identify it by sight, rather than testing. This makes it a great instigator for hypochondria among pregnant women, as well as a solid crotch-punch to their self-esteem.

6. Metabolic Disruption

Another hallmark of pregnancy is the double-threat of morning sickness and intense, spontaneous food cravings (or, in some cases, pseudo-food cravings).

These only scratch the surface of the metabolic disruption that afflicts women over the course of their term, and beyond.

While more than 90 percent of pregnant women will experience some degree of morning sickness, in some cases that persistent nausea is actually hyperemesis gravidarum: vomiting so intense and relentless that patients begin to lose weight, dehydrate, and potentially die. It is less common in the developing world, although it remains fatal elsewhere, and is often slow to be diagnosed because it is easy (at first, anyway) to mistake for routine morning sickness.

Even among healthy women, it is possible to develop gestational diabetes, which is exactly what it sounds like: diabetes that develops during pregnancy, creating a cascade of health problems for the mother and her fetus, and putting both at a permanently elevated risk of developing Type II diabetes later on. Gestational diabetes typically diminishes after the pregnancy, but it frequently will lead to a chronic disruption in the woman’s glucose metabolism, not always to the point that it can be diagnosed as diabetes, but significant enough to require medical treatment and dietary management.

Then there is preeclampsia. This condition seems simple on the surface: hypertension, or high blood-pressure, accompanying or following pregnancy. While doctors have been aware of it for nearly two centuries, they still can’t quite figure out what causes it. It seems to correlate with gestational diabetes, for example, but it has also been linked to insufficient vitamin D and sunlight exposure. Of course, too much exposure also tends to spur chloasma, but preeclampsia is more than a passing cosmetic concern.

Hypertension is not particularly healthy for mother or infant to begin with, but along with the elevated blood pressure comes a concentration of proteins in the blood stream. The blood-brain barrier, you may recall, is meant to filter proteins out before blood reaches the brain, but given the hiccups in BBB function during pregnancy, this doesn’t alway work correctly. Preeclampsia can thus graduate to full eclampsia, which is characterized by violent seizures and is very often deadly.

Alternatively, the telltale protein in the blood and hypertension may not manifest, and the preeclampsia will instead rear its head in the form of HELLP syndrome, which entails: Hemolysis (the red blood cells begin to break down), Elevated Liver enzymes, and Low Platelet count (the blood won’t clot properly). This all starts out like pretty much every other symptom of pregnancy: fatigue, nausea, aches and pains, which makes it hard to identify. It can escalate to a bleeding disorder–especially deadly when it isn’t caught before delivery–or else turn into full eclampsia.

Perplexingly, risk factors for major metabolic complications include pretty much everything: it being the woman’s first pregnancy, as well as it being the woman’s second or greater pregnancy; a history of eating disorders like anorexia, as well as obesity. As with all things to with pregnancy, there is a precise happy medium that no one can quite pin down, and everything else falls into “extreme” territory and becomes a threat to the mother.

5. Sleep Cycles Destroyed

People around the world are pretty sleep-deprived to begin with, but growing evidence indicates that women tend to get less sleep than men. Even without adding children or pregnancy to the picture, women’s elevated levels of estrogen, and the cyclical hormonal fluctuations that accompany their menstrual cycles mean that their circadian rhythms are under constant bombardment.

All of the aforementioned complications and features of pregnancy–the metabolic changes, the constant pain, the hormonal fireworks (which make it harder for women to mitigate their urge to pee, especially when they are trying to sleep)–combine to put a good night’s rest on a nine-month hiatus.

Finally having the child at home doesn’t help matters much, as the irregular feeding, pooping, and crying cycles of the newborn–along with some residual hormones tapdancing on the mother’s nerves–ensure that sleep, much like tomorrow, is always a day away.

Pregnancy and motherhood constantly blur the line between insomnia and outright sleep-deprivation, and even for women in otherwise perfect health, this becomes a risk factor for every other pregnancy complication, as well as mood disorders, accidental injury, and death.

4. Potty Problems

There is really no nice way to say it–which is probably why so much of the time, nobody says anything, and the new mother finds out the hard way:

No matter how the mother delivers–naturally, or by C-section–she is going to have some poop issues.

Caesarean surgery (C-section) is a procedure in which the baby is removed from the mother’s abdomen, rather than delivered naturally. It has become the most common form of major surgery in the world, due to the fact that more than a third of all births in the United States are via C-section. It is also completely unnecessary a great deal of the time, yet mothers frequently capitulate under the persistent pressure to elect to have the surgery.

Although c-sections are meant to be a pathway to avoid high-risk pregnancies and deliveries, bypassing vaginal delivery entirely, they still often lead to some form of incontinence: that is, mom no longer has any choice in when or where her bladder evacuates. In the case of C-section deliveries, though, there is a risk of laceration of the internal organs, including various parts of the digestive tract, as well as the bladder, uterus, and all the reproductive organs (obviously, that’s what C-sections are for–as a complication, this type of laceration is unintentional beyond what is required for delivery).

Doing it the old fashioned way, of course, involves a lot of straining and pelvic tension, which invariably results in the mother clearing out her bowels and uterus right at the same time. Precisely because almost all vaginal deliveries involve pooping, it generally gets no attention: the medical staff are ready to scoop the telltale turd right out of the way to clear the landing zone for the newborn, and the mother so preoccupied that she very likely won’t notice that it happened.

She likely will notice in the weeks following delivery, however, when she finds herself strapping on a diaper to manage persistent incontinence. That’s right: it isn’t just babies who need diapers. Alternatively, all the straining and trauma (surgical as well as natural) that accompanies either type of delivery can also cause the sphincter to go on strike, and constipation to set in after childbirth. Depending on the severity, this can be remedied by something as innocuous as prune juice and high-fiber cereals, or the more sporting suppository laxative.

But mother’s is not the only fecal event in the aptly named delivery room.

Although still fed via umbilical cord and not able to “poop” in the full sense of the word, it is possible for the fetus to evacuate its own developing digestive system while still in the womb. These fetal feces–known as meconium–are released into the amniotic fluid suspended inside the uterus. Because the fetus does not take its first breath until after it has exited its mother, it can be at risk for meconium aspiration, literally choking on its own poop before it is even born. Stress experienced by the pregnant mother can stimulate a fetus to pass meconium–anything from excessive exertion to extreme shock. Since vaginal delivery pretty well meets both definitions, it is common for meconium to be discharged during birth, which while unpleasant, puts the fetus at lower risk of aspiration.

3. Emotional Trauma

Clearly, pregnancy and childbirth is a pretty extreme experience–the impact of which is not aided in the least by the tendency for most cultures to “yada yada yada” their way from conception to the intangible, life-altering joy of parenthood. Besides glossing over the less attractive details of the whole process, it sets up some extremely misguided expectations in people going through pregnancy.

As many as one out of every four known pregnancies ends in miscarriage, also known as spontaneous abortion. Causes range from obvious lifestyle issues (drug use, diet) to previously unknown problems with the mother’s reproductive system, to immune system responses terminating the gestation of the young embryo.

If the emphasis on “known” pregnancies seems odd, try to appreciate that a small yet measurable proportion of women manage to carry a fetus all the way to delivery without recognizing that they are pregnant. Accounting for all of these unknown pregnancies, the rate of miscarriage is estimated to be as high as one in three. All these statistics distinguish miscarriages from stillbirths, which are essentially when the same problems terminate a pregnancy after 20 or more weeks of gestation. Measured separately, this accounts for another 26,000 births per year in the U.S. alone, a rate which has remained stable for more than a decade.

The identities of women and girls around the world can be extremely caught up in maternity and the joy (or obligation) to bear children. As such, miscarriage can be a source of pronounced personal shame, trauma, and depression.

Healthy mothers who successfully delivery live, resilient babies are still at risk for developing postpartum depression, a serious condition whose name is well know, but whose nature is poorly understood. Postpartum disorders can manifest as anxiety and obsessive compulsive behaviors, often revolving around the safety and welfare of the newborn. It can also take shape as a more typical form of depression, involving extreme sadness, a sense of isolation, hopelessness, and general despondency. Again, because an idealized expectation for maternity can dominate women’s identities, postpartum symptoms can involve extreme guilt, a sense of failure, or a fear that somehow, you are not fulfilling your role as a mother.

Postpartum depression is not entirely the result of socialization. Ongoing research is exploring the role of genetic factors in causing the disorder, in the hopes of providing better treatment to suffering mothers.

Roughly 10 percent of all women will experience post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) at some point in their lives, and research indicates that women who go through pregnancy are at an elevated, lifelong risk of experiencing or exacerbating symptoms of PTSD. This can result in all manner of complications during and after pregnancy, afflicting both mother and child. There is also strong evidence indicating that extreme trauma can be imprinted on DNA and passed from mother to child; survivors of the Holocaust and the 9/11 attacks have been shown to have transmitted a genetic imprint of their experiences to their children.

2. Obstetric Trauma

Whatever your opinion of trigger warnings, consider this a final opportunity to avoid learning things you cannot unlearn.

All scatalogic discourse aside, human childbirth is a messy process, equally as likely to traumatize mothers physically as emotionally.

Although the physiological and historical reasons are unclear, the bottom line is that humans have evolved to have larger heads, without females evolving large enough pelvic bones to accommodate them. Put differently: babies’ heads are generally too big to fit through their mothers’ birth canals.

In some cases, these relative differences are so extreme, there is truly no alternative to C-section delivery. For everyone else, that means a long, slow, painful delivery–more than nine hours on average–that will likely result in one of two typical forms of obstetric trauma.

First: vaginal tearing. The sheer pressure of gigantic baby head against tiny vaginal opening can’t go on without one side giving way, and that side is almost always the strip of skin (perineal area) connecting the vagina with the anus. First-time mothers have a 95 percent chance of at least some tearing occurring during delivery.

Sometimes, of course, the blunt force of the baby’s battering ram cranium isn’t enough to break through. That is when your friendly obstetrician-gynecologist will slice open your vagina manually, a procedure known as episiotomy, which surgically lacerates the perineal skin and lets the newborn slip through the tattered genital curtain.

The alternative (or unavoidable side-effect, unfortunately) to all the heaving and hemorrhaging of natural delivery is injury to the mother’s coccyx. Although this is often described as a fracturing or bruising of the tailbone, it is effectively more like a dislocation caused by the infant on its way out.

As might be expected, the subsequent recovery period frequently entails incontinence (and more diapers) as well as a loss of sexual desire. It only takes a few weeks for most perineal lacerations (incidental or manual) to heal, although some require stitching to hold them together until the skin can grow back together.

Last but not least, there is pelvic organ prolapse.

Imagine wearing a latex glove, then trying to remove it. About half the time, you will find the glove sticks to your hand and turns at least partially inside-out when you yank it off.

Now imagine that your hand is a baby, and the glove is a vagina.

That is, one finger of that glove is a vagina; the others are, potentially, the bladder, uterus, rectum, or intestines. And they may not all come flopping out right when you remove your hand/baby; any of them could emerge from the stretched out opening at any time, even 20 years after the initial delivery.

As you might expect, historical records of this occurring are as old as humanity itself, yet general awareness of it is very low. Because it makes for such an uncomfortable subject of conversation, experts expect that the actual rate of occurrence is much higher than the rate of reporting–which is already more than 50 percent of all mothers.

1. Momnesia

How many diseases have the ability to make you forget how terrible they were, so that you are driven to go out and get it again? Well, that is the genius and horror that is human reproduction: after it tears up mothers from the inside out, in ways both visible and invisible, it sets off one final coup de grace of hormonal chain reactions to cover its tracks.

Actually, some evidence suggests that short-term memory loss is a feature of even the earlier stages of pregnancy–hence the phrase, “pregnancy brain” or “baby brain” in reference to lapses of memory associated with pregnancy.

Other literature refers to a “halo effect,” which is when mothers over time begin to recall the pain of delivery less, and the joys of motherhood, thrill of seeing their newborn, or other positive features of childbirth more. It is debated whether this is a result of hormonal events following delivery, or simply a cognitive fallacy expressed in the context of maternity. This is part of the reason breast-feeding and other maternal bonding activities are encouraged, though: they can help trigger the release of hormones associated with happiness, socialization, and the formation of relationships.

There is other evidence that memory problems can be a side effect of postpartum depression, although this is not strictly limited to memories of the pain of delivery.

Whatever the specific cause, studies have repeatedly shown that for a majority of mothers, individual ratings of memories of the pain of childbirth go down over time. It is as though experiencing some sort of biological Stockholm Syndrome that makes them talk about how grateful they are to have given birth, rather than the more honest, “Yup, this melon-headed ankle-biter split me like firewood coming out.”

Pregnancy happens to be a pretty surreal experience for women. This broad term encompasses the mental, emotional as well as physical dishevels, you are always bound to experience during this milestone in your life. Still, this should not in any way come as a shock to you as a little babe is developing within you. With this bundle of joy, often come some extremely freaky hormonal surges. These surges have been known, time and again, to trigger some really wacky things to the bodies of expectant mothers. All this can be quite aptly be summed up in the following simple words; pregnancy is a bizarre, but still magical mystery. Well then, here are some weird things that begin to happen when you are with child.

10. You can get real hippy

As your body starts to accustom itself to the impending delivery process at the end of your pregnancy, the pelvic bone actually starts to split at its middle. This “weird” change is attributable to the hormone Relaxin that works by relaxing the uterine muscle tissue. It also plays a key role in separating the pubic bone and the softening of the cervix. This particular hormone can as well affect other joints in the body, and cause the bane of all pregnant ladies; joint and back pain. This is not helped by the fact that they are carrying an extra load in their bodies. While not all
these changes are in any way amusing, they are good for you and your unborn baby, as they will let you give birth in safe manner.

9. You can start to develop a real darkish side

You might have remarked a darkish line beneath your tummy and belly button, which at times get a bit browner. Well, this is what is called linea niagrea. But when the pregnancy hormones start to do their thing, this dark pigmentation gets more conspicuous. Even worse, this darkening of the skin does not limit itself to this area of your body alone. You can begin to notice real dark spots on your faces that are referred to as melasma.

8. Your vagina appearance can literally become indistinguishable

With pregnancy, you can start notice that the appearance of your vagina has started to alter in a drastic manner to a bluish or even a purplish hue. This is known as the Chadwick sign. At the same time, your vagina can begin to “flesh” up due to an augmentation in blood flow. For those really unlucky women, pregnancy can also make them to sport strange sore and bluish varicose veins on their vulvas. This is usually attributable to the extra weight and pressure that is exerted on the uterus. This occurrence, in turn, triggers a reduction of blood flow to your nether regions. Fortunately, all this starts to clear up several weeks after delivery.

7. Hair growth everywhere

The hormone upheavals that pregnancy perpetrates can cause increased hair growth in literally every area of your body. As a boon, the hair on your head will become longer and thicken. However, sometimes like it has just been pointed, you can start noticing hair growth on regions where you have never had a wisp of hair. Some of the most notable of these areas are the face, chest, tummy and even the arms. This weird occurrence is normally attributable to an increase of male hormones production from the ovaries and placenta. Fortunately, this spurt of extraordinary hair growth wanes off after you give birth. So, never freak out, when you start sporting a mustache.

6. Brain fog

A recent study has revealed that around 80% of ladies often experience memory lapses. No one really understands why this is the case or even the factors which trigger it. Yet, it is likely due to hormonal dishevels, sleep deprivation and pent up stress that characterize pregnancy.

5. Bloating everywhere

Your tummy is not the only area of your body where you will develop a bump during pregnancy. It is very common among expectant mothers to experience bloating and swelling across their whole bodies. This includes the face, feet, calves and fingers. The reason behind this queer bloating tends to vary. Partly, it can caused by excessive fluid levels retained in your body during pregnancy. On the other hand, the frequent surges in the hormones estrogen and progesterone can trigger the soft muscles to relax. In some cases, this will cause your digestive system to slow down in order to guarantee nutrients can be extracted for the growing baby. A natural byproduct is the increased accumulation of excessive gas, which is another critical factor to the general bloating effect. And, of course, the endless burping that invariably follows suit.

4. Vampire breath

I just can’t get enough of those pesky hormonal upheavals that occur during pregnancy. Well, when these hormones do their thing, the bacteria found in your mouth can get inflamed and overgrown, and in the extreme, can trigger bleeding and you guessed it, bad breath.

3. Leakages

When you get pregnant, rampage leakage is yet another weird thing you can begin to experience. The flood banks can burst open not only from the vagina, but also the breasts, and in some circumstances, from both of them at the same time. It is perfect natural for the amount, texture as well as frequency of bodily discharges to alter in a drastic manner. This is simply because you are carrying a baby within you. Still, most of these leakages are not in any way dangerous. But for greater safety, always make it point to consult your gynecologist to absolutely rule out
amniotic fluid leakage, infections or sexual transmitted diseases.

2. Your voice can drastic alter

The dramatic increase in the production of estrogen and progesterone can even affect virtually all areas of your body when you are with child. This can include your lung capacity and muscle regulation. All of these alterations can cause your vocal cords to get swollen. In turn, this will make you to lose the capacity of reaching higher vocal notes , but strangely it will also lead to a significant gain in the lower vocal range. This change is, of course, temporary and your voice will get normal after your delivery.

1. Itchy tummy

When the skin is stretched in a rapid manner, it can get very dry, itchy irritable, and yes, this very often results in the dreaded stretch marks. When it comes to the itchy feeling, its severity can vary from one lady to next, but it always a very uncomfortable experience. To be able to efficiently deal with this issue, reduce the temperature of your shower or bath. Alternatively, you can apply a moisturizing cream or oil, prior to drying yourself after you take a bath.

On a parting shot, if you are really interested in hearing your unborn baby’s heartbeat always ensure that you procure a convenient fetal doppler to help you out. With a high quality device, you will be able to hear your baby’s heartbeat from between 8 to 12 weeks after conception.

Author: Susy Richards is a lovely mother of 3 girls (3 years, 4 years and 5) and a simple woman who is ready to share her priceless experience with other mommies around the world. She is an Advanced Practice Provider who passed birth doula and postpartum doula courses at Childbirth International in 2013. Susy is passionate about providing holistic care and is involved in pregnancy research currently publishing her articles concerning pregnancy on site rocketparents.com