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Take a minute and read this article from the Coventry Times about women in the UK being given Metformin (a diabetes drug) to avoid their babies being born obese.
Yes. Babies being born obese.
Metformin will save the world from fat babies that may or may not grow up to be obese adults. And don't forget the added bonus of starting disordered eating in the fucking womb as the drug reduces the amount of food and nutrients a baby takes from its mother's blood for the express purpose of pre-birth weight control.
Because nature doesn't have that handled already, right? Manipulating an unborn baby's food supply to keep it slim sounds like a great idea, doesn't it?
Well, doesn't it?
Not so much. Here, have a block quote from Professor Siobhan Quenby, honorary consultant obstetrician at Warwick University (how's that for a title?):
“It’s a fact that pregnancy increases appetite. There are exercise classes held through Coventry Primary Care Trust but I haven’t yet come across a patient who wants to go – and we can’t force them to.
“At least with this trial all the woman has to do is take tablets – so it should be easy to stick to.
“During the trial we will monitor the pregnancy very carefully. Some women find they can’t tolerate the drug and it makes them a bit sick, but there are not any what we would call ‘significant’ risks.”
She added: “The drug tests will give us an awful lot of information and may help thousands of women in the future so I really hope it will work.”
She hopes it will work? She's advocating giving a drug to a pregnant woman with the sole purpose of it affecting her unborn baby's weight, and she hopes it will work. And I guess all the fat pregnant ladies are too lazy to try to lose weight during pregnancy, but perhaps they'll deign to lift their arm to take a few tablets.
The end of the article states that this is a trial, involving 400 pregnant women. Half will take the Metformin and half won't. I am having a hard time wrapping my head around any overseeing body agreeing to what involves human trials of a weight loss drug for unborn babies.
I can understand why some mothers might have been tempted into the trial in the first place. I can remember being a 220-pound pregnant 20-year-old who spent a lot of time being worried that she'd have a baby that would turn into a fat child. (I at least wasn't worried she'd be obese at birth. Who comes up with this shit?) But I was only ten years ahead of being the fat kid in elementary school. It was traumatic. And I wasn't even fat. What if my baby really was fat? What if she was bullied, like I was. What if she hated her body, like I hated mine? She'd blame me. She'd hate me. Everyone in the world would blame me. I was already ruining her life!
See the neurosis there?
I think I can say with almost complete conviction that I would not have agreed to take unnecessary diabetes medication to help ensure that I didn't give birth to an obese infant 18 years ago. But, who knows. I wanted (and want, have always wanted) the best for all of my kids. Now I know that being allowed to just live, comfortably, in the bodies they have is the best for them. In fact, I knew that early on. But during that first pregnancy, when I was terrified and unsure, or even the second one that happened less than a year later? If a doctor approached me and told me that my baby was at risk and that I needed to take these pills, I'm not sure what I would have done.
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Shaunta Grimes blogs about body image and athleticism at Live Once, Juicy. You can also find her on Twitter.
