This is the Guardian. Globally more than 800 women and nearly 7,000 newborns die each day from pregnancy-related

complications, the vast majority of which are preventable.

Yet over the past 40 years, only two new medicines have been approved for use in pregnancy.

What this means in reality is that common medical conditions arising in pregnancy often have no treatments.

And GPs can have almost no information on whether existing drugs the women are taking are safe to continue with.

So why aren't drugs being developed and approved when women and babies are dying needlessly.

And how can we make sure pregnant women benefit from modern medicine? I'm

In Sample, the Guardian Science Editor Editor and this is Science Weekly. Peter Brokkelhurst, you're a professor of women's health at the University of Birmingham

and you recently co-authored a report about the lack of suitable medicines in pregnancy

and the fact that pregnant people are routinely excluded from

medical trials.

First of all, why is that?

Why aren't people who are pregnant getting medicines like everyone else?

Well, I think this takes back to the Thalidomide disaster of the late 1950s and very early 1960s.

Theledomide was a drug which was given to women who had nausea and vomiting in early pregnancy.

Some of the fetuses that were exposed, they developed a condition called Focamelea,

which is very short limbs and deformities of the hands and feet.

Theletamide was never tested in clinical treatment. and deformities of the hands and feet.

Theletomite was never tested in clinical trials.

It was simply used in pregnant women.

And understandably, because of the terrible consequences,

people have been very afraid to either test medicines in pregnancy or in particular

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