The Hidden Truth About The Most Common Cause Of Miscarriage And How To Prevent It

A healthy pregnancy that culminates in the delivery of a healthy girl or boy. Isn’t that the hope that every woman has when she finds out that she’s pregnant? Isn’t that the most amazing and blissful experience a woman can ever have?

For sure, the answer is yes, but, very often, women experience pregnancy loss through miscarriage early in the pregnancy. Thanks to the technology used in modern medicine today, doctors are able to monitor all the stages of pregnancy and most importantly detect and prevent threats to the lives of the baby and the mother. Yet, despite this, a lot of mothers go through the painful and devastating experience of child loss.

Dr. John Littell is a family physician who has provided women with both prenatal and obstetric care for over 25 years. He makes an attempt to discover all that he knows about the causes of pregnancy loss through miscarriage and possible ways to prevent it.

So, he says that many OB-GYNs neglect to help women find out the underlying cause of her miscarriage which will enable her to have a healthy pregnancy the next time. He emphasizes that many OB-GYNs gloss over the role that low progesterone levels have in many miscarriages and how a prior use of the Pill can play a part for a lot of women.

Even early in his training, he says it seemed to him there was something wrong about not doing anything to prevent miscarriage in the second, or even first, pregnancy of the woman. As if the lives of the babies or the physical and emotional suffering of women aren’t important.

One view of early miscarriages is that they’re caused by chromosomal defects in the baby. Yet, as he suggests this is something that serves as a comfort to parents because they attribute the unexpected loss of their baby to a condition incompatible with life outside the womb.

It’s totally okay when physicians caring for women who have experienced miscarriage are compassionate to those who are broken by the loss of their baby. But, if they give comforting words at the cost of correct and precise information and efforts to give them the best care, then they’re failing women as physicians.

So, instead of consoling women who are going through this physical and emotional turmoil, Dr. Littell suggests that physicians should give women and couples hope in the form of a prescription for preventing miscarriages in the future.

After several years of practice and after his wife experienced a couple of miscarriages, Dr. Littell tried to get to the bottom of why miscarriages happen so that they can prevent them. And he found out that the underlying cause of most miscarriages is one that can be easily prevented. He realized that the true cause of many if not most miscarriages is the relative absence of progesterone – the reproductive hormone vital for the unborn child’s life within the womb.

It’s important for women to have adequate levels of this hormone as it prepares the body for pregnancy and it also improves the flow of the blood to the baby through the developing placenta.

Women’s ability to produce progesterone is affected by many factors, but the most common reason why women have inadequate levels of this hormone is that they’ve recently taken or are still taking oral contraceptives or other forms of birth control which suppress the woman’s natural reproductive cycle and ovulation.

This means that OB-GYNs should tell their patients to wait from 4 to 6 months before becoming pregnant after a woman has stopped taking birth control pills.

There are available methods of testing each woman’s progesterone level so as to ensure she has adequate levels, and there are a lot of ways of administering the hormone to women that have lower levels and as a result of that a higher risk of miscarriage. Yet, the need for adequate progesterone levels is overshadowed by a lot of OB-GYNs.

So, why is this so? One reason may be many OB-GYNs’ tendency to over-prescribe birth control pills. Or maybe providers are unwilling to voice a con to the Pill. Yet, given the fact that hormonal imbalance can be resolved with progesterone supplements, nothing of this is justifiable.

In fact, this is easy to implement. Namely, after measuring progesterone levels in each woman who achieves or is striving to achieve pregnancy, physicians increase the patient’s progesterone levels by oral supplement, intramuscular injection, or even intravaginal.

The same method is used for women who have chosen to have a “chemical abortion” by using a medication that blocks the effects of progesterone in early pregnancy. So, women who change their minds about this are given sufficiently high doses of the hormone to reverse the effects of the medication.

Dr. Littell concludes that OB-GYNs are actually aware of the role hormonal imbalance has in miscarriage, and they’ve coined the term “chemical pregnancy” to refer to that. And this, according to Dr. Littell, is just an attempt to decrease a woman’s emotional pain by making it look like she couldn’t have done anything to prevent it.

Instead of this, women should be provided with accurate information, such as that about the important role of progesterone in healthy pregnancy, so that they can make the best decisions for themselves and their kids.