Excess weight in pregnant women, both before pregnancy and gained during pregnancy, is the main predictor of whether mothers will have larger than average babies, which can result in increased risk of cesarean section or trauma during delivery, states a study published in CMAJ (Canadian Medical Association Journal). Women ...

Christy Turlington Burns, maternal health advocate and founder of Every Mother Counts, notes in this GlobalPost "Global Pulse" opinion piece that "99 percent of women who die during or after childbirth live in the developing world," and women and girls ages 19 and younger are at a higher risk of ...

Newly released "estimates of maternal mortality from the United Nations' Maternal Mortality Estimation Inter-Agency Group (MMEIG) are good news – but not good enough," Peter Byass, professor of global health at Umea University in Sweden and director of the Umea Centre for Global Health Research, writes in this post in ...

"The number of women dying of pregnancy- and childbirth-related complications has almost halved in 20 years, according to new estimates released [on Wednesday] by the United Nations, which stressed that greater progress is still needed in significantly reducing maternal deaths," the U.N. News Centre reports.

Clinical trials are underway to test an azithromycin-based combination treatment for pregnant women, "which could tackle some of the leading preventable causes of death for babies in sub-Saharan Africa," according to researchers from the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine (LSHTM), who published a report on Wednesday in the ...

That overweight during pregnancy can lead to overweight children and adolescents has been known for some time, but new research at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and in the US indicates that excess weight before and during pregnancy can have long-lasting health consequences for the offspring of such mothers even ...

A citywide ban on public smoking in Colorado led to significant decreases in maternal smoking and preterm births, providing the first evidence in the U.S. that such interventions can impact maternal and fetal health, according to an article in Journal of Women's Health, a peer-reviewed publication from Mary Ann Liebert, ...

(Mary Ann Liebert, Inc./Genetic Engineering News) A citywide ban on public smoking in Colorado led to significant decreases in maternal smoking and preterm births, providing the first evidence in the US that such interventions can impact maternal and fetal health.

"Just two years ago, our country had one of the worst maternal and infant death rates in the world," Sierra Leone President Ernest Bai Koroma writes in a Huffington Post U.K. "Impact" blog post, adding, "We knew something had to be done." So in September 2009, the government announced "that ...

On May 3, 2012, Rady Children's Hospital-San Diego and the UC San Diego School of Medicine launched the Center for the Promotion of Maternal Health and Infant Development.

Pregnant women may have added incentive to bulk up on broccoli and eggs now that a Cornell University study has found increased maternal intake of the nutrient choline could decrease their children's chances of developing hypertension and diabetes later in life.

A study published online in JAMA reveals that the rate of mothers abusing opiates during pregnancy has increased by almost five times between 2000 and 2009 in the United States. In addition, the researchers found that the number of newborns with drug withdrawal symptoms (neonatal abstinence syndrome [NAS]) has increased ...