Pregnancy, Women | featured news

Left infertile after being abducted and raped as an 8-year-old back in 1990, Jennifer Schuett despaired of ever having a normal life – and a baby of her own. Schuett’s fallopian tubes had become blocked as a result of an infection she caught from her rapist, and her only hope was very expensive in-vitro fertilization.

While a student in my final year of college, at age 21, I was raped. I have dissected that moment -- the horrifying moment that I became a "victim" -- from every possible angle. I have poked and prodded, examined and re-examined. Regrettably, I have even suspected myself in a desperate, ultimately futile attempt to understand how I became a victim.

Showing no sign of backing down from his U.S. Senate candidacy, Todd Akin released a television ad in which he apologizes for his remarks about "legitimate rape" seldom causing pregnancy and asks for forgiveness.

In a surprise news conference Monday, President Barack Obama addressed the controversy surrounding a remark by Rep. Todd Akin (R-Mo.) that women who suffer "legitimate rape" rarely get pregnant. "The views expressed were offensive," said Obama. "Rape is rape. And the idea that we should be parsing and qualifying and slicing what types of rape we are talking about doesn't make sense to the American people and certainly doesn't make sense to me. So what I think these comments do underscore is why we shouldn't have a bunch of politicians, a majority of whom are men, making health care decisions on behalf of women."

Marissa Mayer's move from Google exec to Yahoo! CEO made her one of the most powerful women in the tech industry. Her announcement just three hours later that she's expecting her first child made her "the most powerful pregnant woman in America," says Lisa Belkin of The Huffington Post.

It's now official -- the first 1,000 days of your life -- conception to your second birthday is what decides how healthy or brainy you will be the rest of your life. For mothers force-feeding their teenage children with "healthy food" or pushing them to go out to play, scientific evidence now clearly proves that what a mother eats while pregnant influences the child's memory, concentration, judgement, intellect, mood and emotions.

Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell has signed into law a controversial bill requiring women to have an ultrasound before undergoing an abortion.

For 60 years, doctors have believed women were born with all the eggs they'll ever have. Now, Harvard scientists are challenging that dogma.

A small, but growing trend of women in the US are choosing home births, a new government report finds. These mostly over 35, non-Hispanic white women are "consciously rejecting the system" of hospital deliveries, says the researcher.

Jenni Lake gave birth to a baby boy the month before her 18th birthday, though she was not destined to become just another teenage mother. That much, she knew. While being admitted to the hospital, she pulled her nurse down to her at bed level and whispered into her ear. The nurse would later repeat the girl's words to comfort her family, as their worst fears were realized a day after Jenni's baby was born.