Eating a high-fat diet in pregnancy may cause changes in the foetal brain that lead to over-eating and obesity early in life, research suggests. Tests on rats showed those born to mothers fed a high-fat diet had many more brain cells specialised to produce appetite-stimulating proteins. The Rockefeller University team say the finding may help explain why obesity rates have soared in recent years.
Pregnant in America examines the betrayal of humanity’s greatest gift–birth–by the greed of U.S. corporations. Hospitals, insurance companies and other members of the healthcare industry have all pushed aside the best care of our infants and mothers to play the power game of raking in huge profits.
His wife pregnant, first-time filmmaker Steve Buonaugurio set out to create a film that will expose the underside of the U.S. childbirth industry and help end its neglectful exploitation of pregnancy and birth with help from producers Betsy Chasse and Straw Weisman.
Childbirth experts want women to know that they have more options than they think. ” A lot of people think that it is a medical necessity to be in the hospital, and really 90 percent of births actually are fine and completely normal,” said Heather Paris, a childbirth educator. “It’s a different idea that women would choose to give birth without drugs,” said Clarice Winkler, a certified nurse midwife. And they want mothers in Mid-Michigan to get used to that idea, that’s why they’re bringing natural child birth awareness to Lansing, a place they say alternative childbirth options are few and far between.
Researchers studying a critical stage of pregnancy – implantation of the embryo in the uterus – have found a protein that is vital to the growth of new blood vessels that sustain the embryo. Without this protein, which is produced in higher quantities in the presence of estrogen, the embryo is unlikely to survive. This is the first study to detail the mechanism by which the steroid hormone estrogen spurs cell differentiation and blood-vessel growth in the uterus during pregnancy, the researchers report.
The Coalition for Improving Maternity Services (CIMS) is a coalition of individuals and national organizations with concern for the care and well-being of mothers, babies, and families. Our mission is to promote a wellness model of maternity care that will improve birth outcomes and substantially reduce costs. This evidence-based mother-, baby-, and family-friendly model focuses on prevention and wellness as the alternatives to high-cost screening, diagnosis, and treatment programs.
For years, consumers have enthusiastically shared online reviews of movies, restaurants, products and services, but readily available information about maternity care providers and birth settings was nearly unattainable. No longer. CIMS’ The Birth Survey is an online resource for women to share their consumer reviews of doctors, midwives, hospitals, and birth centers, learn about the choices and birth experiences of others, and view data on hospital and birth center standard practices and intervention rates.
The Tatia Oden French Memorial Foundation is dedicated to empowering women, specifically in the area of childbirth and pregnancy. We are dedicated to saving the lives of those giving life to others. The Tatia Oden French Memorial Foundation is presently focusing on the issues of informed consent, the off-label use of drugs, and maternal mortality.
In December of 2001, Maddy Oden’s daughter, Tatia Oden French, entered a well-known and well-respected hospital to deliver her first child. She was 32 years old, in perfect health, and looking forward to a natural childbirth. There were no problems during the pregnancy. According to her doctor’s calculations, she was a little under 2 weeks overdue. She was given the drug Cytotec (Misoprostol) to induce her labor. Ten hours after being administered Cytotec, Tatia suffered hyperstimulation of her uterus, an amniotic fluid embolism was released, and an emergency C-Section was performed because the baby was also in distress. Both Tatia and her baby Zorah died in the operating room.
Music therapy can reduce psychological stress among pregnant women, according to research just published in a special complementary and alternative therapy medicine issue of the UK-based Journal of Clinical Nursing. Researchers from the College of Nursing at Kaohsiung Medical University, Taiwan, randomly assigned 116 pregnant women to a music group and 120 to a control group. “The music group showed significant reductions in stress, anxiety and depression after just two weeks, using three established measurement scales” says Professor Chung-Hey Chen, who is now based at the National Cheng Kung University.
The odds of having a premature baby are lowest in Vermont and highest in Mississippi. The March of Dimes mapped the stark state-by-state disparities in what it called a “report card” on prematurity Wednesday — to track progress toward meeting a federal goal of lowering preterm births. There’s not much chance of meeting that goal by the original 2010 deadline, if the “D” grade the charity bestowed on the nation is any indication.
Teams from the international medical humanitarian organization Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières’ (MSF) are struggling to provide free, quality emergency care to pregnant women and their babies in Port-au-Prince, the capital of Haiti. Over the last month, hundreds of women have desperately sought emergency obstetric care at Jude-Anne hospital in Port-au-Prince. In October, hospital staff assisted a record high of 56 women giving birth in one day and received 160 women waiting for hospitalization. The hospital has been so overwhelmed by demand that mothers have given birth in the hospital’s waiting room, the staircases, and in the washrooms, essentially anywhere they could find space. For this 60-bed emergency hospital (including five delivery beds), with an average rate of 35 births per day, this is an untenable situation.
Breastfeeding for at least four months helps children breathe more easily and may curb their susceptibility to asthma, reveals research published ahead of print in the journal Thorax.
Safe in selected women, and with adequate infrastructure and support birth is an event of great importance in family life. Although pregnancy and delivery are, under healthy conditions, normal social and physiological processes, childbirth has become hospital centred in most industrialised countries. The assumption is that hospital based deliveries are safer for mother and child. Yet the Cumberlege report sees home birth as a real option, and the wishes of women to have home births must be viewed in that light.
The number of Chinese women who rely on breast milk alone to feed their newborns has dropped as working mothers have less time to nurse and fall prey to advertising about the benefits of infant formulas.
Such economic pressures have taken China’s tainted milk crisis to every corner of the country. They also explain why a country disgusted by an even deadlier fake baby formula scandal four years ago has been so badly hit again.
Pregnant teenagers are taking up smoking in the hope of having smaller babies so that childbirth is less painful, a Government minister warned. Labour’s public health minister Caroline Flint made the extraordinary claim after discussions with health professionals and young mothers. Miss Flint warned women that the practice was futile because the commonly-held idea that giving birth to a large baby is more painful is a myth.
It is one of the world’s greatest hidden epidemics, but the search for a solution is hopelessly underfunded. On average, every minute of every day a woman somewhere dies in childbirth or pregnancy, the overwhelming majority in developing countries. It is estimated that they number more than half a million every year, in what Norway’s Prime Minister, Jens Stoltenberg, told the United Nations last week was ‘the biggest expression of brutality to women I can imagine’.
Are males becoming an endangered species? That’s the question scientists and researchers have been pondering since alarming trends in male fertility rates, birth defects and disorders began emerging around the world. More and more boys are being born with genital defects and are suffering from learning disabilities, autism and Tourette’s syndrome, among other disorders. Male infertility rates are on the rise and the quality of an average man’s sperm is declining, according to some studies.