 Alert - Pregnancy's prior to 1972!!
The dangers of drugs during pregnancySource: Robert Baird / American Chronicle Date: 11/ 02/2007
If
anyone ever doubted that drugs taken by the mother, with minimal
maternal effects, could be disastrous for the fetus, the frightening
experiences with thalidomide and DES (diethylstilbestrol) dispelled
this.
Thalidomide was introduced in Europe in the 1960s as a mild sedative
to encourage sleep. Unfortunately, pregnant women often have difficulty
sleeping and many of them took the drug. Within a year the disaster
became obvious. Large numbers of malformed babies were born. They had
one form or another of what is technically referred to as phocomelia .
The children lacked long bones in their arms and legs and had flippers
for hands and feet.
The unfortunate experience with DES came to light in the early
1970s. This synthetic estrogen was given to women who had a multitude
of problems with their pregnancies. Motivated by the mistaken
expectation that it would improve the outcome of pregnancy, doctors
prescribed DES for pregnant women who had diabetes and bleeding. It was
given early in pregnancy to women who had previous miscarriages or
unexplained second-trimester pregnancy losses. Four to six million
pregnant women were treated with varying amounts of DES for varying
durations of their pregnancies during a period of over twenty years,
from the late 1940s into the early 1970s.
Articles doubting the benefit of DES appeared in medical journals as
early as 1953. Yet, the adverse effects of DES on the daughters of
women who took the drug during pregnancy did not make themselves known
until the daughters were well into adolescence, explaining the 20-year
delay in identifying the problems DES produced. Researchers took even
longer to verify the less noticeable changes in the sons, a small
percentage of whom have some anatomic abnormalities.
The first DES warning was the appearance in Boston of an unusual
kind of cancer of the vagina among young women. This unusual cancer had
been seen before in older women, but the occurrence over a short time
in a substantial number of adolescents pointed to an environmental
cause. Investigators rapidly made the connection with DES given to the
mothers.
The epidemic of cancer among DES daughters appears to be over,
although whether there will be additional carcinogenic effects as this
group of women ages remains unknown. In addition to various
nonmalignant changes in the anatomy of the vagina, cervix, and uterus,
a number of DES daughters have had difficulty becoming pregnant or
maintaining their pregnancies. They have more frequent miscarriages,
ectopic pregnancies, and premature labors .
If you were born before 1972 and think you may be a DES daughter,
ask your mother whether she took any drugs during her pregnancy. Since
memory is inexact and since DES-type drugs were marketed under numerous
trade names, also ask your physician or midwife to examine you
specifically to look for the typical anatomic changes produced by DES.
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