Why Being Pregnant Becomes The Scourge After Marriage

In Indonesia, we face the unspoken unique culture that being pregnant for woman is a duty to be accomplished after marriage. Our circumstance deems the marriage will not be completed if there is no babies delivered afterwards. 

Pregnancy become one of the instrument to measure the couple's happiness and our society command that the newly weds should not take long time to have a bump in bride's belly. 

Those pressure usually come from family, particularly their parents, friends, or even the woman's own partner with various arguments. Family urges to continue descents, hereinafter partners are accusing that baby can strengthen their marriage's bound.

In fact, being pregnant is not as simple as people think. Pregnancy is a condition which gives complex disruption to your body's system. The hormones will give impact on physiology alteration and provoke imbalance in your body's chemical and anatomy. In other words, being pregnant put every woman in harmful condition and, harshly said, closer to death. One of the alteration occurred is the escalation of body fluid inside the mother's vessel in order to fullfill the baby's demand. 

Unfortunately, the fluid volume escalation will make their heart pump harder to compensate the intra-vessel's high pressure. It can lead to hypertension disease if the mother's basal condition before being pregnant can not overcome the alteration. 

If hypertensive condition is not well treated, other organs will get impacted and release unfavorable toxic metabolite, furthermore there is a huge chance of seizure in the mother. This condition called as eclampsia and become one of the highest cause of maternal mortality.

On the other side, mental problem become another rising disease in pregnant women. This condition sneaks up along those pregnant women, crawling in silence particularly in those who did not have prior preparation to face pregnancy. Mental health problem in pregnant woman can be seen as depression, anxiety or other psycotic form such as halucination. 

Those symptomps can develop during pregnancy or post-delivery. Furthermore, there are a lot of diseases contributed by pregnancy which  can lower both the mother's quality of life and the quality of born babies.

The pregnant woman need to fulfill the intake of herself and the baby, but most of them make a wrong assumption that they need to take food portion twice bigger. 

The actual concept is they should reach their nutrition target. Most of the nutrition can not be completed only by daily meals, so the pregnant woman need to get prescription for additional supplementation. In order to have healthy pregnancy, the supplementation should be given prior to the plan of conception. 

Therefore, the couple who desire to have pregnancy directly after their marriage need to meet their physician to plan what kind of supplementation they should take.

 One of the supplementation that need to be taken prior to the plan of conception is folic acid. Folic acid should be consumed 3 months before the beginning of pregnancy to make sure the baby's neural tube would not get defect and her/his brain well developed.

During the pregnancy, the pregnant mother also need to obtain other abundant nutrition. Basically, they do not need any kind of additional supplementation if their meals are closely concerned. In fact, most of the Indonesian mother do not have enough basal nutrition as they tend to choose food that make them stay full instead of food that fullfill the nutrition list. For instance, prior researches conducted in Jakarta found that more than 50% womenin Jakarta is in anaemia condition due to iron deficiency. 

Sadly, Jakarta respresents a metropolitan city where nutritious foods are effortlessly obtained. This condition occurred because they do not consume enough meal containing iron such as meat and poultry, whereas they lose their blood monthly through their period which decrease their iron levels in their body. 

Iron actually is one of the most important nutrition needed for pregnant woman. If they have lack iron level through their pregnancy, the chance of having preterm, low birth weight or growth retardation baby increase.

We have not talked about the mental health issue. Pregnancy is indeed a plentiful imbalance hormonal condition that can come out as mental health problems. 

People around pregnant woman are required to espouse this altered circumstances without judging or punishing her peculiarity. If a pregnant woman reveal some symptomps which bothering their daily activity, an appointment to meet the doctor become necessary.

Previous study run in Indonesia prove that babies with multiple problems caused by unprepared pregnancy tend to have lower IQ and EQ, they also have bigger chance to develop metabolic disease such as hypertension or diabetes when they grow as an adult. 

In other words, if a country want to have higher quality of human resources who can earn much for country's income, they need to prepare them before they are born.

Other developed country such as Japan has implemented many regulation to support pregnant women getting proper antenatal care. They has understood that nutrition during pregnancy is primary necessity so they keep watching closely every pregnant women's meals to lower the needs of giving additional supplementation as they can gain full nutrition from their foods. 

Furthermore, they make antenatal examination is easily attained by each pregnant women, such as ultrasonography examination or USG. They have already known that USG is not a probe which only reveal baby's gender, but also to detect any growth defect so it can be treated earlier. Thus, this examination has to be performed as early as pregnancy detected.

Looking at the considerable preparation required to start a pregnancy mentioned above, the newly wed have to think thrice before making a decision. Being pregnant is not a competition and it should not be a rush after marriage. 

There are a lot of preparation to be fullfilled by a couple prior to pregnancy. One thing to bear in mind that being pregnant is every woman's right, instead of being their duty. 

They need to be accompanied and guided through this phase and prepared with enough nutrition as well to have healthy born babies. Eventually, prepared pregnancy yields to high quality human resources for a country.