Heidi Murkoff — Author

Heidi Murkoff is the author of the world's best-selling pregnancy and parenting series, What to Expect, that began with What to Expect When You're Expecting. She is also the creator of WhatToExpect.com and founder of the What to Expect Foundation. Time magazine named Heidi one of the 100 Most Influential People in the World for 2011. In 2005, she was inducted into the Books For A Better Life Hall of Fame... (wikipedia)

It doesn't take a brain surgeon... or a cardiologist... or a pediatrician... or even a policy wonk to figure out that a penny's worth of preventive care is worth many dollars of sick care.
Taking pre-natal vitamins can minimise birth defects and can lower the chances both of morning sickness and premature delivery.
When I was first pregnant, which was, let's see, in nineteen-eighty-three - I remember wearing a regular bathing suit to my in-laws' pool. It was just like a spandex one-piece, completely modest, and yet people were looking at me like it was obscene.
I was the first in my peer group to get pregnant. All I craved was reassurance. I needed someone to tell me that all the seemingly random symptoms I had - weird things, such as excess saliva - were normal. And I was worried because I wasn't getting any morning sickness.
As obesity creeps into preschools, and hypertension and type II diabetes become pediatric problems for the very first time, the case for starting preventive health care in the cradle has become too compelling to keep ignoring.