Child Birth, Women | featured news

Robert Edwards, a Nobel prizewinner from Britain whose pioneering in vitro fertilization research led to the first test tube baby and has since brought millions of people into the world, died Wednesday at age 87....

I wish I'd had the option of egg freezing. Egg freezing is the newest reproductive technology: a recently perfected form of flash-freezing that allows human eggs to be successfully stored in egg banks. Only commercially available in American IVF clinics since October 2012, when the "experimental" label was lifted, egg freezing is being heralded as a "revolution in the way women age," a "reproductive backstop," a "fertility insurance policy," an "egg savings account" and in particular, a way for ambitious career women to postpone motherhood until they are ready.

Manuel and Tressa Montalvo on the 1 in 70 million chances of giving birth to two sets of twins at the same time.

Two Swedish women may be able to bear children using the wombs which carried them, doctors say, hailing the world's first mother-daughter uterus transplants.

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.

Are wealthy women too posh to push? A new British study shows that upper-class women are more likely to get elective C-sections, raising new questions about who get the surgery -- and why.

Deaths from pregnancy-related causes, which usually occur around the time of childbirth, have risen dramatically in the United States in the last decade. In a report released Tuesday, a committee investigating such deaths in California cited an increase in caesarean-section births as a major contributor to the disturbing trend.

A simple treatment - a hormone-containing vaginal gel - significantly reduces premature births among pregnant women who are at high risk because of a problem with the cervix, government researchers reported Wednesday....