Improving Birth

A Newsweek article points to a systematic review (a study of studies) finding that doctors perform cesareans in the belief that it will protect them from being sued, but that isn’t the half [...]

According to provisional U.S. data for 2017, after four years of inching downward from 32.9% in 2013 to 31.9% in 2016, the overall cesarean rate rose by a tenth of a percentage point to 32.0% in [...]

Consumer Reports announces the publication of the latest U.S. birth statistics. The 2016 cesarean rate was 31.9%, continuing a decline for the fourth year in a row, but don’t break out the [...]

Several articles on U.S. maternal mortality rates have popped up over the last month or so, most of them using an NPR report as their primary source. Working conjointly with ProPublica, NPR spent [...]

The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) issued a press release highlighting a study finding that planned cesarean or induction before 39 completed weeks increases the odds of developmental [...]

The past few years have seen a flurry of reports and guidelines aimed at improving the quality of maternity care. These include “Supporting healthy and normal physiologic childbirth: a consensus [...]

Henci’s latest guest post on Connecting the Dots looks at the recent analysis of trends in U.S. maternal mortality from 2000 to 2014 together with other related research and media responses that [...]

Amy Tuteur has managed to score a commentary in the Washington Post entitled “How the natural birth industry sets mothers up for guilt and shame.” You would think that the inflammatory rhetoric [...]

NPR reports on a study comparing outcomes between Medicaid-funded singleton births in 1935 women having doula care and 65,147 similar women who did not. After adjustment for maternal age, [...]

Women’s eNews summarizes a New York City Department of Health report on maternal mortality between 2006 and 2010 finding that women of color were more likely to die of pregnancy-related [...]