When Karen A. McDonnell was nine weeks’ pregnant, she heard the baby’s heartbeat for the first time on a monitor in her doctor’s office and decided it was finally time to share her good news. So the assistant professor of public health at George Washington University called her mother, her sister, and her best friend. Then, before she told her department chairman, or her other friends and relatives, she walked a block from her office to put her expected newborn –Ã? who did not even have a name yet –Ã? on the waiting list at George Washington’s child-care center.
Office of Strategic Communication