Pregnancy is the most important thing to us as a human race, as without it we would not be where we are today. Well let’s be real we wouldn’t even exist if it wasn’t for our mother’s strong pain tolerance and our father’s willingness to want a child. For everyone pregnancy can be different; some it’s easy to get pregnant while other struggle with infertility their entire life and can never have a child of their own. Pregnancy has changed over the years in many different way: where the mother tends to give birth, how she gives birth, which prenatal vitamins are given, the foods she can and cannot eat, even which types of physical activity can be dangerous or not, the list goes on and on. A major controversy in the 1950’s and 1960’s was with the use of thalidomide. Barbra Clow states, “Thalidomide first appeared in West Germany in 1957, under the trade name Contergan. It was synthesized in 1953 by Chemie Gruenethal and then tested on animal and human subjects before being released for general consumption. These early experiments suggested the Contergan was not only a highly effective sleeping aid, but also an exceptionally safe one” (47). Although the start of this medicine started in Germany, “On 1 April 1961 Richardson-Merrell’s brand of thalidomide, Kevadon, went on sale in Canada” (Clow, 47). The pill seemed to have so many great reasons to start taking it, yet the issues with the pill came not only after only taking it for a couple weeks, but also after the child was already born and it was too late. There were many “disturbing side effects which included severe constipation, hangover, loss of memory, hypotension, petechial hemorrhages, trembling, incoordination, numbness, and even partial paralysis” (Clow, 48). “Doctors even began to notice a disturbing increase in phocomelia, an unusual congenital anomaly involving the absence or shortening of the arms and/or legs die to the malformation of the long bones, with associated abnormalities of the hands, feet, fingers, and/or toes” (Clow, 48). Many women had trouble if they became pregnant during this time yet medicine wasn’t the only issue that was evolving. During the same time in the 1950’s and the 1960’s to study of exercise and pregnancy was being studied. In this time, “cracks began to appear in the discursive field of physical activity and pregnancy as texts publishing in the newly developing field of sport medicine referred to a number of pregnant women competing in high level athletic competitions, including the Olympic Games. While several of these texts questioned the safety of such behaviors and advised them against it (despite acknowledging that no ill effects had been reported), long-held assumptions about the abilities of the pregnant body began to be called into question” (Jette, 296). Many studies took place and many are still being tested today because they don’t know the true effect of exercise on not only the mother but the fetus inside her. Today, “it is argued that women are gaining too much weight during pregnancy, (and) are “programming” the fetus to be an overweight/obese adult, and are failing to lose the extra weight post-pregnancy. Exercise during pregnancy has thus taken on a new significance and moderate exercise is being constructed within a growing amount of medical literature as a tool to prevent the “maternal-fetus diseases” of overweight/obesity and diabetes in both the mother and child” (Jette, 309). There is still much discussion about what, if any, specific exercises are safe during pregnancy. Yet as time goes on more research will be able to predict the outcome of strenuous physical activities on pregnant women. Another dispute about the “healthy way to be pregnant” is at which place should you have your child born; hospital or home birth. “Midwifery as a social movement shares with feminist scholarship on reproduction critical readings of mainstream maternity care as a process that alienates women from their bodies, fragments the potential wholeness of the birth experience, and commodifies both women and babies. This medicalization thesis holds that obstetric medicine developed its tools and technologies for the control and manipulation of what was purported to be the inherently defective, and therefore dangerous, process of birth” (Macdonald, 239). A midwife isn’t something that every women decides to use while they are going through the pregnancy process. The facts about whether or not to use a midwife, or go into the hospital, or stay at home to give birth have changed throughout the years. And will continue to change. The future holds so many possibilities for the medical research, and the likelihood of the change in social norms of pregnancy.