Gastric Bypass and Pregnancy
Are gastric bypass and pregnancy mutually exclusive? That’s a question that’s on the mind of a lot of women who are seriously overweight and are considering having weight loss surgery. This procedure is getting more popular all the time – hundreds of thousands of Americans have had one form of gastric bypass or another. And it’s easy to understand why. For anyone resorting to weight loss surgery, they’ve got to be desperate and at the end of the rope. Every reputable gastric surgeon instructs prospective patients to exhaust all other efforts to lose weight before resorting to the last resort of bypass surgery.
For a lot of those prospective patients, gastric bypass and pregnancy are one of their top concerns. They’re afraid that if they have the surgery they can never have any more children. Well, generally speaking, that’s not the case. Thousands of women have given birth to healthy babies after having weight loss surgery, and most women should be able to. There’s certainly no medical reason that the surgery would interfere with getting pregnant or carrying the baby. The main concern is getting enough nutrition to keep the fetus healthy, because post-bypass women can eat only small amounts of food. But doctors say that by eating healthy, and taking the right combination of vitamins and supplements, pregnant women can provide their baby with the required nutrition.
One consideration when it comes to gastric bypass and pregnancy is your chance of getting pregnant and carrying a baby while morbidly obese if you don’t have the surgery. Seriously overweight women tend to have more trouble getting pregnant that do women of a healthy weight, and on average they have more complications during the pregnancy and delivery, too. So think about the fact that not getting the weight off may prevent you from having any more babies when making your decision. Of course, any post-bypass woman wanting to have a baby should seek medical advice from her physician before and during pregnancy. But for most women, getting pregnant after bypass surgery is quite feasible.
