Worldcrunch
In Afghanistan, where it is considered a disgrace to have only daughters in a family, some families raise their girls as boys — giving them male names, boys’ clothes and the freedoms typically denied to Afghan girls. But what happens to these girls when they grow up?
Robust winter babies? Allergic autumn infants? Researchers are finding increasing evidence that the month and season of birth can have an influence on our health. For Die Zeit, health editor Andrea Böhnke explores how light, weather, mother’s diet and other factors linked to the time of the year we are born shape us throughout our lives.
Updated July 25, 2024 at 12:15 p.m. Louise Brown, known at the time as the world’s first “test tube” baby was born on this day in 1978 in Oldham, England. Her birth marked a significant milestone in reproductive medicine and assisted reproductive technology. What does it mean to be a “test tube baby”? The term […]
Erasing the practice of midwifery through legislation seems impossible, yet fear persists in Mexico, which counts at least 16,000 midwives, trusted by thousands of women every year, especially peasant and indigenous women.
The Iranian regime has been trying different methods to encourage people to have children. Most have failed, for economic reasons.
Seven out of ten children in Egypt are born by Caesarian section, over three times the world average, according to recent government data. C-sections may be more profitable and easier to schedule for overworked and understaffed medical personnel, but they represent a higher physical and mental health risk for new mothers and babies. Civil society and the government are trying to bring more awareness — but reversing the trend will take time.
For families learning their child will be born with a debilitating condition, new legal issues create additional trauma.
If I were running a company I would never hire women. At least once a month they are sick, and in the days leading up to it, there are endless complaints. If they’re nearing their thirties, they want to find a husband and have children. Then when they do, the real disaster begins. Hysterical and […]
The CCP is not used to sharing the decision-making role with the public, but that may be exactly what all sides need to try to encourage more Chinese people to have babies.
As the pandemic’s first wave of lockdowns began, there was plenty of chatter about how it would affect couples, relationships and sex — and consequently what it would mean for contraception. Earlier this year, the UN warned in a report that more than 47 million women in 114 countries could lose access to contraception if […]
The pandemic added an extra layer of obstacles for patients with already limited access to quality attention for their sexual and reproductive health needs.
We must remember the many lives lost to coronavirus. But we should also not forget the fate of many new lives that have been left up in the air as travel bans and strained health care systems have disrupted plans for surrogacy, adoption and in vitro fertilization around the world. Surrogacy: Some 100 surrogacy babies […]
In India’s patriarchal society, there’s a cultural tendency to favor boys, which leads to too many parents each year abandoning their baby girls. At least there is a way to avoid the worst outcome.
JALALABAD — Shah Zaman, 11, spends his days carting people’s luggage to earn a few cents. His mother died during his birth and soon after, his father remarried. “I wish my mother had been taken to the hospital,” he says. Shah lives in Jalalabad, in eastern Afghanistan, where war and internal conflicts have weakened the local economy and health system. Like in so many parts of the country, health facilities lack trained staff. In more remote areas, health facilities can also be hours away, making it difficult for pregnant women to reach them in time. This, in a country where […]
An entire industry has been built to exploit Chinese couples desperate desire for their children to obtain U.S. or Canadian passports. But because the process requires both operators and clients to distort the truth, homeland security has launched a crack
BEIJING — One of the overlooked problems brought by China’s infamous family planning policy is a crticial gender imbalance. With the latest release of the country’s demographic data, Beijing has openly acknowledged the situation, as China’s National Health and Family Planning Commission declared that is the country “with the most serious gender imbalance at birth […]
GUANGZHOU — It has been three days since Zheng Yuling gave birth. Her breasts are as hard as stone and she is in great pain. She wishes she could breastfeed her baby. But the child is no longer there. And her husband, Chen Dafu, was arrested the day before for the crime of abandoning the […]
First established in Colombia, kangaroo care for underweight babies relies on constant mother-child contact and avoids costs and complications of incubators that rarely arrive in Africa.