Health Care

How To Pregnancy Testing ?

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 In New Hampshire, a bill to redefine opioid use or addiction in pregnant women as child abuse is making its way through the legislature, despite vocal objection from the state’s medical community 

When should you test? You can take most home pregnancy tests three to four days before your missed period -- but if you test too early, you're more likely to get a false negative, where the test says you're not pregnant but you really are, says Laurence Cole, MD, professor of obstetrics and gynecology and chief of women's health research at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque.

This illusion is increasingly hard to sustain.

In March 2014, Purvi Patel, a 33-year-old woman in Indiana, was sentenced to 20 years imprisonment for, prosecutors claim, inducing an abortion. Patel has maintained she had a miscarriage, and has never tested positive for any of the abortifacients the prosecution claims she took. In fact, the pathologist for the prosecution partially relied on the long discredited “lung test“ to determine if the recovered fetus had been born alive: a practice from the 17th century disproven as bad science over a century ago.

From a medical perspective, fetal personhood bills make no sense. “Conception“ is not a medical term and is interchangeably used to refer to the moment an ovum is fertilized and the moment a fertilized ovum implants in the uterine lining. “Fertilization“ is a medical term—referring to fusion of male and female gametes to form a zygote—but not all fertilized ova implant in the uterine lining (that is: not all result in a pregnancy), and the precise moment of both fertilization and implantation is hard to determine. As a result, the length of a pregnancy is usually calculated with reference to the pregnant woman’s last period—when she clearly was not pregnant yet—because that moment is an observable factor that can be defined. See this next post....

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