Thanks for the chair MummyBATW I'm hoping since I have had a period that the depo is wearing off, but I've started temping and haven't noticed any obvious rises or falls yet.
escapeartist I've been in Germany 10 years and I speak fluent German. I live in the former GDR and I was surprised to find that so many people here aren't that confident speaking English (which however helped me to learn German). I would expect that most drs in west Germany would speak pretty good English though, at least when talking about their fields of expertise.
The care during pregnancy here was great. There are GPs here (called Hausarzt), but there are also lots of specialists working in their own practices, so when you are pregnant you go straight to a "Frauenarzt" (OB/GYN). They have ultrasound and CTG machines at the surgery. I was scanned at my first appointment (3 days after the positive hpt), which I guess was to confirm the pregnancy and rule out an ectopic. The baby was too small to be seen at all at that point, so they made another appointment for 10 days later, at which point the heartbeat was visible. I continued to have scans at every appointment, plus I was referred to the hospital for a diagnostic scan at about 16 weeks. They wanted to do a CTG every week from 28 weeks, which I went along with, but I probably wouldn't bother second time round.
The ante-natal class was run by a midwife who was then responsible for my post-natal care. She came to see me every day for the first 10 days and then once a week until 8 weeks. I could have registered with a midwife much earlier in the pregnancy and had regular appointments with her as well, but I saw so much of the dr there didn't seem much point.
The only negative thing was the breastfeeding support in the hospital. I didn't feel there was any sort of concerted drive to encourage new mums to bf and although my own midwife was very strongly pro-bf, she wasn't around all day and the other midwives and nurses seemed to be waiting for me to give up and ask for a bottle. This is probably very different from hospital to hospital though.
Do you know where you would be moving to?