It is every mother’s nightmare: battling an illness or a disease while pregnant and having not one but two lives in the balance. Caroline Swain and Dina Fiasconaro are two of those women. Caroline found out she had breast cancer and a few weeks later learned that she was pregnant with Luke, Dina on the otherhand was struggling with mental illness while pregnant with her little girl.  

Thousands of women face the same problems as Caroline and Dina. And not knowing whether it is ok to take their medication or receive treatment makes things even worse. They are diagnosed with an illness, from rheumatoid arthritis to lupus, and they become pregnant, or they get pregnant and then find out they have cancer. They are kept in the dark, surrounded by doubts and concerns. Most of the time, these women and their doctors don't have enough information about their treatment options to safeguard their health and their baby's.

Listen to their stories:

So we're on a mission.

At the  Pregnancy & Medicine Initiative, together with our partners Mummy's Star and Pregnancy Sickness Support, we’ve created information kits that help pregnant women with medical conditions ask their doctors the right questions. 

With every £2 donated, you are making a contribution that can impact two lives. Our dream is to send these kits to 100 hospitals in the UK and offer support to women in your area. 

We’ve already been able to provide 20 hospitals in the US with our information kits. Each one contains on average 2 posters and 150 flyers, depending on the size of the hospital. 

We need your help!

Every £10 raised will help reach around 150 women. By donating, you can help us get this information to expecting mums who need it and the more money we raise, the more women we can help.. If we reach our target of £35,000, we’ll be able to send information kits to 100 hospitals in the UK, and we’ll also be sharing some of the proceeds with other charities who support pregnant women (those with medical conditions or with questions about medication and pregnancy). If we’re successful with this campaign, we also hope to reach other countries.

Where your money goes

Having the right information is the first step towards an informed decision about treatment and medication options. Thanks to your donation, you are helping to:

• Inform pregnant women at their point of care with doctor-validated information toolkits that include posters and flyers (50% of money raised)
• Fund on-the-ground charities including  Mummy's Star and  Pregnancy Sickness Support that support pregnant women with medical conditions (25% of money raised)
• Support our future activities to continue to increase awareness. In the short term, this will be to fund campaigns that will help us prove to the medical community that women all around the world care deeply about this issue. In the longer term, we seek to create pregnancy registries, advocate for pregnant women’s rights, and to help bring this issue to the top of the medical agenda (25% of money raised)

See the impact

Your donation will bring information toolkits to hospitals and medical centres in the UK. See the list and locations in this interactive map. We are looking to add many more hospitals to this list.

Stories

We will be updating this section during the campaign with selected stories about women who have faced the issue of taking medicine during pregnancy. Read all our stories and blog posts on our website.

The Pregnancy & Medicine Initiative, part of The Synergist, aims to raise awareness and help address the information vacuum concerning the use of medicines and medical treatment in pregnancy. By working together to shift medical thinking, we can ensure that mothers-to-be can have three basic rights:

Read more about The Pregnancy & Medicine Initiative.