Giving Birth With Confidence

Amy Romano’s blog entry last month alerted us to the fact that Patricia Hewitt, the British Health Secretary, commissioned a report to examine the latest evidence on home births with a view to making them more available. In fact, this is part of a larger look at maternity care practices in Britain with a view [...]

I was in Toronto a few years ago for a conference and took a day to go exploring around town. I was newly pregnant with my now-2-year-old daughter. Twice while looking for public bathrooms, I instead encountered public lactation lounges (in the art museum and in a large department store). As I walked back [...]

Even in the brief time since our federal government gave the nod to elective cesareans, there have been plenty of new studies in the literature about the harms of unnecessary cesareans. This month, a World Health Organization research team looked at cesarean rates in various hospitals and found an association between high rates of cesarean [...]

The NY Times (Breast-Feed Or Else, June 13, 2006) finally noticed the almost two year government public health campaign to increase breastfeeding rates and the duration of breastfeeding. They accurately identify that the ad campaign message is unambiguous: breastfeed your baby exclusively for at least six months. And they do a nice job identifying the [...]

I happened upon a piece in Yahoo News last week about a new test to predict if an induction of labor will be successful or not. The fetal fibronectin test, which already is marketed for the prediction of preterm labor, looks for a substance that naturally seeps into the vagina from the degrading fetal membranes [...]