The risk of dying in childbirth is five times greater for girls who give birth before age 15 than for women in their 20s, UNICEF said in its annual children's report released on Thursday, the AP/Austin American-Statesman reports. This year's

The Chinese authorities released on Thursday the results of a 2006 survey that showed most women in China would like to have more than the one child they are currently allowed under the country's strict one child per couple rule. The Chinese government says the one child per couple rule has slowed down the country's birth rate and helped millions of people to become wealthier. They are not going to change the rule.

Thirty years ago last summer, the world's first "test-tube" baby was born, and since then more than 1 million infants have been successfully conceived through in vitro fertilization (IVF), the technique in which a woman's eggs and man's sperm are fertilized in a laboratory and then implanted in the mother's womb.

The House on Wednesday is expected to approve State Children's Health Insurance Program renewal and expansion legislation (H.R. 2) that would extend coverage to about four million additional children and also allow states to extend public health benefits to some immigrant pregnant women, the

The North Carolina Legislature's Child Fatality Task Force this week voted to request that lawmakers allocate about $97,000 for progesterone injections to prevent premature childbirth among low-income, uninsured pregnant women, the Raleigh News & Observer reports. North Carolina began offering the drug, known as 17P, to low-income women without insurance in 2007 and continued the program in 2008.

Well-publicized celebrity teenage pregnancies and depictions of teen pregnancy in films represent a "squandered opportunity for a serious national discussion of teen motherhood," panelists said at a recent public policy forum organized by the University of Chicago's Chapin Hall Center for Children, the AP/Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reports.

Complications during pregnancy and birth, such as birth hypoxia - the shortage of oxygen in the body - are associated with an increased risk for schizophrenia. However, it is not clear why hypoxia increases the risk for schizophrenia. The November 1st issue of Biological Psychiatry includes an article by researchers who show that the presence of a specific indicator of fetal distress following hypoxia was more likely to be present among people who later develop schizophrenia.

A team of UK researchers has found that women who develop pre-eclampsia in pregnancy have lower than normal levels of a marker protein in their blood at the three-month stage and this could open the door to developing a simple blood test for this potentially life-threatening condition.

New DNA tests to screen fetuses for a wider array of genetic abnormalities early in pregnancy are raising some hopes as well as concerns that the "flood of murky, misleading results" could lead to more abortions and "needlessly alarm" many people, the Washington Post reports.

Stress during pregnancy can have unfortunate consequences for children born under those conditions - slower development, learning and attention difficulties, anxiety and depressive symptoms and possibly even autism.

A study has found that the risks of a premature birth quadruple if flaxseed oil is consumed in the last two trimesters of pregnancy. The research was conducted by Professor Anick Bérard of the Université de Montréal's Faculty of Pharmacy and the Sainte-Justine Hospital Research Center and Master's student Krystel Moussally. In Canada, 50 percent of pregnant women take prescription medication. Yet many of them prefer to use natural health products during the pregnancy.

Several techniques are often employed by drug companies to secretly promote off-label use, according to a piece released on October 27, 2008 in the open-access journal PLoS Medicine. For most drugs, it is legal to prescribe them for off-label uses, which are not specified in the original approval of the drug. These uses are sometimes unavoidable -- for instance, most approvals do not include pregnant women, who may need medication.

The National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) has published three new commissioning guides to help the NHS in England effectively commission evidence-based care for patients. The guides cover services for: accurate diagnosis of the epilepsies in adults antenatal and postnatal mental health peer support for women who breastfeed.

One in five black women in Oklahoma faces barriers to starting prenatal care, such as transportation problems, inability to obtain a doctor's appointment when wanted and not being able to begin prenatal treatment when wanted, according to an Oklahoma State Department of Health report released on Tuesday, the

In the not so distant past, women with systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE), an autoimmune disease, were advised not to have children, and if they became pregnant, to have therapeutic abortions to prevent severe flares of their lupus. Research by rheumatologists at Hospital for Special Surgery in New York, in patients with lupus who have had successful pregnancies is yielding insights that support a reversal of that thinking.

Researchers at the Heidelberg University Hospital have discovered a new genetic disease that can lead to severe liver damage. Because a protective component of the bile is missing, the liver cells are exposed to the toxic components of the bile, resulting in cirrhosis of liver, a transformation of liver cells into connective tissue with a gradual loss of liver function. This could explain some of the cases of liver cirrhosis of unknown origin and open up a new approach for treatment.

Do mothers purposely expose their offspring to their own stress? If so, why? The question arises because it is widely accepted that exposure to maternal stress during pre-natal development can have negative impacts on offspring following birth.

A new study in the October issue of Preventing Chronic Disease, a CDC journal, examined rates of unplanned pregnancies, prenatal care and other reproductive health factors among women living in Brownsville, Texas, and Matamoros, Mexico, the San Antonio Express-News reports.

A study by the Oklahoma State Department of Health (OSDH) Pregnancy Risk Assessment Monitoring System (PRAMS) shows although rates of prenatal care are generally the same for African American and white women in Oklahoma, one in five African American women face significant barriers beginning prenatal care. These include transportation problems, not being able to get an appointment when wanted, and not being able to begin prenatal care as early as wanted.

Coming soon… Health in Pregnancy Grant to be launched April 2009 From April 2009, all pregnant women will be entitled to the Health in Pregnancy Grant (HiPG) The HiPG is a universal one-off payment available to expectant mothers from the 25th week of pregnancy.