A practical guide to navigating conflicting pregnancy headlines with confidence - in honor of National Immunization Awareness Month
When tens of conflicting and clickbaiting headlines and notifications flood your phone’s home screen every day, it’s no surprise that there’s more vaccine hesitancy, confusion, and controversy than ever – particularly for pregnant moms.
There’s a different headline for every side of the same issue, social media posts and comments garner tens of thousands of likes and shares, and hundreds of well-meaning (yet often unsolicited) anecdotes are offered to pregnant moms (“well my husband’s sister just did that during her pregnancy, and the baby turned out totally fine!”). It can be overwhelming to simply navigate it all, let alone to feel truly informed and confident in your decisions.
Being able to cut through the noise and feel informed has never been more important than it is today, especially as sources and agencies previously viewed as the gold standard of trustworthiness, reliability, and rigor have come into the spotlight themselves as contradicting one another, and even espousing misinformation themselves.
So how do you go about making sense of it all, especially when you have thousands of other things competing for your attention every day?
This isn’t just scrolling social media and Google to find out which baby stroller is actually the best, or which skincare products will definitely brighten your skin – it’s making decisions you stand by and can feel confident in when considering health decisions that affect you, your baby, and your family.
Few pregnancy health topics are more discussed, and more polarizing, than vaccines. This National Immunization Awareness month, since we’re big evidence nerds here at Zenith Health (so much so that we built Penny, your Pregnancy Evidence Navigator), we put together a few tips on making sense for yourself of what’s real, what’s not, and ways to feel more confident and empowered in navigating these important decisions during pregnancy.
When a new headline is shared in your group chat, you’re searching on social media for information, or your mother-in-law offers another ‘suggestion’ on your pregnancy, here are 3 steps you can take to ensure you walk away feeling informed, confident and empowered, rather than overwhelmed and confused:
- Start with yourself
- Evaluate the claim
- Consider the context
1 - Start with yourself
First and foremost - understand your own risk tolerance, goals and preferences. Not everything is relevant to every single pregnant person, and every person has their own set of tradeoffs and values that inform personal decision making.
You might start by reflecting: What kind of information am I seeking? What am I trying to achieve - actively make a decision, feel validated or comforted, find community, challenge my own perspective, or learn more about the science and research?
Sometimes, all we want is anecdotal information in that moment of panic (show me proof that this has happened to someone else and it could still turn out okay for me!). Other times, we’re ready to go down the rabbit hole and learn everything available about a topic - preparing to make decisions, consult with care teams, and understand the best available research to feel confident. Both are great goals, but would likely result in different sources of information being most valuable.
Make sure you can articulate your own personal set of values and risk tolerance, as they relate to your pregnancy. Especially during pregnancy, every health decision is highly personal - women have varying degrees of risk tolerance, different personal belief systems (religious, political and otherwise), and different goals (just make it through this pregnancy! prioritize a natural pregnancy and birth, with minimal or no intervention! try the newest and most cutting-edge approaches that are available! make the fewest quality-of-life sacrifices as possible!) .
For example, avoiding turkey sandwiches during pregnancy may be an easy choice for someone who hates the texture of deli meats and hasn’t eaten a turkey sandwich in 10 years, but someone who eats a deli sandwich for lunch every day pre-pregnancy may determine that the risk is acceptable for them, given the low absolute risk of listeria from deli meats and the tradeoff of giving up sandwiches as higher ‘cost’ for someone who loves them. Both decisions might be the “right” decision for that individual, and their own goals and values.
Looking at incoming information with the lens of what matters most to me? can help you prioritize where to focus your attention and what sources or information warrant further digging or pushback.
2 - Evaluate the claim itself
Next - consider, is the claim itself consistent / repeatedly verified? What types of sources or outlets are publishing or amplifying this claim? If you hear a podcaster share a shocking statistic or see a headline that vaguely references “studies show…,” it’s worth a quick validation. With powerful search capabilities and the sheer amount of information available online, it can be easy to cherry pick examples to support nearly any point – but that means it's also accessible to debunk myths or misinformation if you try. Even ChatGPT can hallucinate and fabricate studies that aren’t real, so it’s often worthwhile to fact-check claims that seem new, different, or controversial.
A few things to ask when looking at a particular claim...
- If a “study” is referenced, is the article or title cited?
- What type of outlet is publishing it, and what credentials do the authors or researchers have?
- Has the study been cited or referenced by other reputable people or sources?
- Is this an n-of-1 example, or a robust look at outcomes across a broader population?
If it’s an experience or anecdote…
- How relevant to your own situation or similar is the person to your experience?
- Are they sharing the full context, or all of the other things that they used/did/tried that could also have affected the outcome?
And a quick reminder - we all know that the data is often imperfect or missing, particularly in women’s health and pregnancy. Beware of the distortion that missing data is ‘proof’ for a certain outcome - just because there are no studies showing the safety of something, doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s actively unsafe, and vice versa - no studies showing adverse outcomes or risks doesn’t mean that there aren’t any risks.
3 - Consider the context
Finally, what incentive or motive is driving someone to share this information, and what’s the context it’s being shared in? Is this coming from a random stranger on the internet, a healthcare professional who sees hundreds of cases a week, a company trying to make a sale, a media outlet trying to get views and clicks, or a well-meaning but uninformed acquaintance or family member?
This isn't to suggest everyone sharing information has an ulterior motive, but it is always worthwhile to consider what perspective or goal someone is bringing to conversation, and what experiences might lead to that perspective.
For example…
- TikTok videos are incentivized by views and shares, so confidently-stated controversial or incredulous ‘hooks’ often perform well (high engagement) – in fact, Maven Clinic recently studied the top #TTC (Trying To Conceive) videos to understand the prevalence of misinformation, and troublingly, found that more than half of the top 100 videos highlight strategies with no evidence base, and that 72% of videos with the potential for direct profit featured misinformation.
- A recent suit by the FTC found a prominent supplement maker guilty of false advertising, for over-representing findings from a single small, company sponsored study (claiming that the supplement improved patients’ memory). The study wasn’t fabricated, it was real & published - but companies can genuinely believe that their products are beneficial, while still being influenced and driven by business incentives in how they present data and interpret research findings.
- Rare but dramatic outcomes often get disproportionate visibility - someone who experiences a severe reaction to a medication is much more likely to post about it online than the thousands who had unremarkable (positive or neutral) experiences. These powerful personal stories are valid and important, but they can also skew our perception of how common such outcomes really are, through common cognitive biases like the availability heuristic.
In navigating important decisions during a pregnancy, many women seek the “truth” to inform their decisions and beliefs. In the current political climate, compounded by living in the age of algorithms where information flows freely and quickly based on what gets the most clicks, what’s presented as the “truth” is often actually polarizing, emotionally-driven content. We’re conditioned to passively consume all of this content day in and day out - without clear signal on the underlying evidence, relevance, or importance.
When the “truth” can feel harder than ever to uncover, know that there are ways to quickly sanity check those comments with hundreds of upvotes, or the headlines lacking the context.
Emphasizing your own values and goals, along with having the tools to quickly validate (or discredit) various claims and sources, can allow you to more thoughtfully consume information and make the decisions that are truthful and right for you in your pregnancy.
About Zenith Health
Zenith Health’s mission is for every pregnancy question to have an answer informed by real evidence, not guesswork, opinions, or pseudoscience. Penny and the Pregnancy Evidence Project enable women to discover existing evidence and data for any pregnancy question, as well as share their own pregnancy experience to power better research and a more robust evidence base for the future.