Taking Medication While Pregnant, Is It Safe?

If you are pregnant or plan to get pregnant, is it safe to take medications, or will they harm you and/or your baby? That’s a question that haunts many pregnant women and medical professionals alike, and it is one that a new research program plans to investigate.

The program is called the Medication Exposure inPregnancy Risk Evaluation Program (MEPREP), and it is a collaborative effort of the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and researchers at the HMO Research Network Center for Education and Research in Therapeutics (CERT), Kaiser Permanente’s multiple research centers, and Vanderbilt University. MEPREP will fund research to study the effects of prescription medications used by women during pregnancy.

Medication and Pregnancy
Everything a woman consumes during pregnancy passes through the placenta to the unborn child, so it is important to avoid medications if possible, especially during the first eight to ten weeks when the baby’s heart, lung, and brain systems are being formed. Some medications are considered safe to take during pregnancy, even though no medication is safe for 100 percent of the people. The effects of many other prescription and over-the-counter drugs on the unborn child are not known. Women who are taking prescription medications and who plan to become pregnant should talk to their doctor before they get pregnant to determine if and how safe it will be for them to continue their medication.

By Deborah Mitchell Copyright eMaxhealth.com 2005-2009

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