EXPECTING BETTER

A groundbreaking guide to pregnancy: empowers women with the facts and allows them to make their own decisions. FREAKANOMICS meets WHAT TO EXPECT WHEN YOU'RE EXPECTING. Award-winning Emily Oster debunks myths about pregnancy to empower women while they're expecting.

Pregnant women are often treated as if they were children, given long lists of items to avoid - alcohol, caffeine, sushi - without any real explanation from their doctors about why. They hear frightening and contradictory myths about everything from weight gain to sleeping on your back to bed rest from friends and pregnancy books. In EXPECTING BETTER, Oster shows that the information given to pregnant women is sometimes wrong and almost always oversimplified.

EXPECTING BETTER overturns standard recommendations for alcohol, caffeine, sushi, bed rest and induction, while putting in context the blanket guidelines for fetal testing, weight gain, risks of pregnancy over the age of 35, and nausea, among others. Oster offers the real-world advice one would never get at the doctor's office. Knowing that the health of your baby is paramount, readers can know more and worry less.

Having the numbers is a tremendous relief - and so is the occasional glass of wine.