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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.
Highlights
See all activity24Thanks to your support, more UK hospitals will receive essential information that will help raise awareness about the pregnancy and medicine. And sometimes the information is all it takes, to bring hope and a positive change. These are the hospitals that will receive the informational toolkits: - The Christie in Manchester - Chapel Allerton Hospital in Leeds - Queen Charlotte's and Chelsea Hospital in London - Kingston hospital in London - Hillingdon Hospital in London Again big thank you to everyone who contributed and shared the campaign! If you see the posters or flyers in your hospital, snap a picture and share it with us.
Our campaign is coming to an end and even though we didn't manage to reach our goal, we still made a difference. Pregnancy & Medicine Initiative's posters and flyers will bring the essential information to Chapel Allerton Hospital in Leeds and Christie Hospital in Manchester. And that's all thanks to you! Without your support, effort and contributions we wouldn't be able to bring positive change and hope to women with diseases, who want to have a family. Our campaign is ending today, but this doesn't mean we will stop raising awareness about the rights of pregnant women. If you want to do more, you can still donate today and share the campaign, so we can send another toolkit to a UK hospital and help more women. You can also print or share our posters and flyers with your friends or other parents, who might need the information. The materials are available on the website of Pregnancy and Medicine Initiative: http://www.pregnancyandmedicine.org/p/resources.html Thank you again for your efforts and support! Together we made a change!
Despite the major advances in medical science, pregnant women often don’t know whether it’s safe to take their medicines… and their doctors are often in the dark too. We want to help future mums find more information, ask their doctors the right questions or get a second opinion. Big thanks to everyone who supported the campaign, thank you for sharing and donating and most of all thank you for caring. Because of your help, more women in UK will have the information they need. Sometimes that’s all it takes to make a difference. We have few more days left and would like to raise enough to send more information toolkits to UK hospitals and help more women. Help us do more.

Caroline Swain beat cancer while pregnant. She shared her story to help other women and learned that it made a change. "There are still doctors out there unnecessarily advising women to terminate pregnancies when in fact they could be treated and keep their bundle of joy. This is truly tragic and raising awareness can help reduce this risk, " says Caroline. Her story encouraged other women in a similar situation, to reach out to her and find new strenght. But it isn’t just about stories… it’s about getting support: http://www.pregnancyandmedicine.org/2015/02/it-isnt-just-about-stories-its-about.html There are many women in similar situations and we'd like to bring them hope, so their stories can inspire and support others. With your help, we can. There are still few days left - share the campaign with your friends and help us spread information that can bring new hope to more women with diseases.
The decision to have a child isn’t always an easy one and can be even harder if there is a disease or illness involved. Currently, information on pregnancy and medicine is not easily available. So, very often the choices are to either stop taking medicine, to take medicine and live with the uncertainty or to avoid pregnancy all together. We want to change this so they won't have to choose between their health and the baby's. With your help we've already raised enough to provide few UK hospitals with information toolkits, that will help women ask the right questions and give them more information about pregnancy and medicine. Big thanks to everyone who shared our campaign and donated! And we can bring positive change to even more women - spread the word and help us reach more hospitals.

We just folded another batch of toolkits. These ones are going to Christie Hospital in Manchester. We'd like to thank you all again for your support! We hope to send even more toolkits in the coming days. Stay tuned!

"What I’ve seen is that doctors are “scared” of pregnant women, and especially wary when you have a mental illness in addition to being pregnant," says Dina Fiasconaro, the author of the documentary Women and Meds. There are many other women like Dina, who struggle to get the information they need for safe and carefree pregnancy. We want to help them break the silence and ask their doctors the right questions. Help us distribute more information toolkits to UK hospitals, so we can reach more women. Share our camaign with your friends! Pregnant women with diseases shouldn't have to compromise their wishes to have a family. Read the whole story about Dina and her documentary Women and Meds: http://www.pregnancyandmedicine.org/2015/02/women-and-meds-documentary-on-mental.html

Over the last 30 years, the use of prescription medication during the first trimester has increased more than 60%. Pregnant women need information on how their medicine will affect them and their child. But they're often left in the dark without the information they need to make an informed decision. We want to change this. They shouldn't have to choose between their health and their baby's. With your help, they can break the silence and ask their doctors the right questions. Help us help them. Every share and donation counts.

Big thanks to everyone, who supported our cause! It is inspiring to see that you're ready to help women with disease have a better and fairer chance at having a family. Because of your help, we are now able to send out few toolkits to hospitals. The first one will go to Chapel Allerton Hospital in Leeds, UK. We hope that in the next weeks we'll raise enough to provide more UK hospitals with the essential information, that can save many lives.

We too hope it will bring hope and inspiration to others in a similar situation.
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