Amnesty International may be best known to American audiences for bringing to light horror stories abroad such as the disappearance of political activists in Argentina or the abysmal conditions inside South African prisons under apartheid. But in a new report on pregnancy and childbirth care in the U.S., Amnesty details the maternal-health care crisis in this country as part of a systemic violation of women's rights. The report, titled "Deadly Delivery," notes that the likelihood of a woman's dying in childbirth in the ...

As doctors and researchers grapple with the U.S.'s runaway rates of obesity, they have begun to look for causes of it in a critical if little understood period of life: the nine months before birth. Research has found that women who gain too much weight in pregnancy have heavier babies — and that heavier babies are more prone to obesity later on. Until now, researchers had not been able to rule out the role of genes. If heavier ...

An Indonesian woman gave birth to a 19-lb. 2-oz. baby behemoth on Sept. 24, but that was only the second weirdest pregnancy tale of the month. The strangest belongs to Julia Grovenburg, a 31-year-old Arkansas woman who has a double pregnancy. No, not twins — Grovenburg became pregnant twice, two weeks apart. Isn't that supposed to be impossible? Almost. There have been only 10 recorded cases of the phenomenon, dubbed superfetation. In Grovenburg's case, she became pregnant first ...

Several studies suggest a link between caffeine consumption and risk of miscarriage. But the cause and effect has never been clear: does caffeine increase a woman's risk of miscarrying, or do women who are already at low risk for miscarriage tend not to drink caffeine? At Kaiser Permanente Northern California's Division of Research, reproductive and perinatal epidemiologist Dr. De-Kun Li wanted to parse the association. He and colleagues recruited 1,063 women in early pregnancy, quizzed them ...

Is it legally permissible and medically ethical to abort a woman for "psychiatric reasons"? In Britain, as in most countries, physicians and surgeons have addressed themselves diligently to this problem. Though far from unanimous in details, they have arrived at a clear consensus on the main point. The consensus: such an operation is very rarely justified.In Britain, abortion is legal only if performed to save the life of the mother, though by court interpretation this has been given a broad construction: "If pregnancy is likely to make ...

They are the forgotten partners. It is obvious but often overlooked: for every teenage mother there is a father, usually a teenager who finds himself treated as an outsider, receiving none of the solicitous attention that occasionally attends the mother and child. These fathers are usually depicted as churlish scamps, irresponsible hit-and-run artists out to prove their sexual prowess without a thought for the consequences. Until recently, no one even seemed to factor the father into the situation. But with ...

Jewels Morris-Davis is a no-nonsense kind of girl. When the high school sophomore turned 16 recently, she didn't celebrate with any My Super Sweet 16 foolishness. Nor did she rush to get her driver's license and race around the back roads in this rural northwest corner of South Carolina. But Jewels did quietly revel in one achievement. "I am," she says a few weeks later, a proud smile spreading across her face, "the first person in my family to reach ...

Pregnancy is often fraught with complications, not least for women suffering from depression while carrying a child: new research suggests that women who take antidepressant medications during pregnancy may have an increased risk of miscarriage. Scientists at the University of Montreal reported Monday, May 31, in the Canadian Medical Association Journal that women taking the drugs most often prescribed to treat depression and anxiety — including selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors , serotonin-norepinephrine reuptake inhibitors and the older ...

Pregnancy rates among U.S. teenagers, which had been dropping since 1990, took an upturn in 2006, according to newly released data. The figures, obtained from government sources and abortion providers by the Guttmacher Institute, a reproductive-health think tank, echo previous Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that births among teens had risen. But the new Guttmacher report rounds out the picture: in 2006, there were 71.5 pregnancies for every 1,000 women under the age of 20. ...

As the case of the so-called Octomom continues to spur outrage and debate over the use of in vitro fertilization in the U.S., new research suggests that the most effective and inexpensive IVF method may also be the least likely to result in dangerous multiple births. A study by Finnish researchers published in the current issue of the journal Human Reproduction finds that transferring a single fresh embryo at a time, followed by subsequent transfers of individual ...