Pregnant Women Warned to Keep Cellphones Away From Their Baby Bump

By Caroline Olney for The Stir Cafe Mom

Image via: parentdish.ca

You know the feeling of being jerked out of sleep when your phone rings really loudly next to your head? It's not what we'd call pleasant, and unfortunately, it looks like your unborn baby knows this feeling, too.

New research shows that Marimba is as much of a wake-up call to your baby as it is for you, and he's not that happy about it.

Most pregnant moms are worried about toting their cellphone around because of what the radiation might do to their baby (which you should probably be worried about, by the way), but it turns out disrupting their sleep cycles could potentially be a problem too, affecting a baby's "sleep-and-wake cycles" in the womb.

The research comes from Wyckoff Heights Medical Center in New York City, where doctors watched fetuses' (who were in their third trimester) reactions to phone rings via ultrasound. Every single baby in the study jolted awake at the sound of the phone.

So we know that the sound of a phone will wake a baby up, but the researchers emphasized that they don't know what exactly that means for the babies. It would take a long-term and large-scale study to see what kind of effects this might have, but it's something that should be looked into futher.

Even without information on the long-term effects, the doctors involved in the study are now recommending that pregnant women carry their phones as far away from the baby as possible -- so, basically, put it in your purse instead of pant pocket and leave it in another room whenever you can get away.

The study's results are far from definitive, but it's another good excuse to put down that smartphone. We want our babies to get the sleep they need to grow, and we're not trying to stress them out with ringing phones before they're even born.

Did you try and distance yourself from your phone while you were pregnant?