Activities when you are pregnant.

As much as we like to think of pregnancy as a normal, healthy state, there are some activities that are just riskier when one is pregnant.

When you are pregnant, your body’s center of gravity changes.  Also, your joints become more lax as an accommodation to the growing baby.  With your abdomen protruding in the later stages of pregnancy, you can’t see your feet as well.  Finally, your blood volume is significantly increased when you are pregnant, and your blood vessels quite dilated.  All of this adds up to the fact that falls are more common during pregnancy.  And their results can be quite serious, both to you and the baby.

A fall at home is usually not a major catastrophe.  Even if you do hurt yourself, you can usually call on friends for help, or make a quick trip to the emergency room at your hospital.  It’s not so easy when you’re far from home.  Especially if you are engaged in activities that tend to occur far from civilization.

Such activities would include skiing, rock climbing, trekking and rafting.  You can probably think of others.  We would not totally forbid these activities during pregnancy, but we would advise extra caution, and that you have adequate plans in place to handle an emergency.

Other activities that require extra balance are such things as riding horses, bicycles and motorcycles.  Even though they may not occur far from civilization, we would again advise special caution.  A fall from one of these during pregnancy may be catastrophic.

Swimming and snorkeling during pregnancy are generally safe, but water-skiing has resulted in falls with injection of water into the birth canal and loss of the baby.  Scuba diving is definitely not advised to any depth or at any stage of pregnancy.  The increased surface pressure on your body and the increased pressure of the air you breathe cause nitrogen to be dissolved in your blood.  This nitrogen may form bubbles as you ascend, and these bubbles then block off blood vessels (“the bends” or “decompression sickness”).  The baby’s tiny circulation is much more sensitive to this and thus the baby is at much greater risk.  Even though there may be some scuba activities that are safe in pregnancy, there is at this time no data to support that.

One other consideration regarding risky activities when you are pregnant is that emergency personnel may not be trained or experienced in handling trauma during pregnancy.  One of the main problems even in the U.S. is what we call “pregnancy panic”.  Not knowing what to do with a pregnant patient often causes delay in appropriate diagnosis and treatment.  In fact, in trauma cases, one of the leading causes of death of the baby is the death of the mother.

So our advice regarding activities far from home is that, as much as possible, you leave the risk-taking for when you are not pregnant.