Surrogacy’s health risks raise ethical issues over whether the practice is exploitative and should be banned.
Tag: pregnancy
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.
In Lebanon, as in many countries in the Arab world, abortion is criminalized, leaving women with few safe options to end a pregnancy. In the Beirut-based independent digital media Daraj, Nour, 20, shares her story of learning she was pregnant out of wedlock and seeking a secret medical abortion.
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.
A better understanding of the placenta may help curb maternal and fetal mortality rates, but progress is slow.
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One Painting, Many Women
One patient tells our Naples-based Dottoré about trauma and aptly-named victims.
Italy decriminalized abortion in 1978, but the law allows for doctors to conscientiously object. And so many do that it makes it difficult for many women to access health care when they need it most, with some turning to unsafe abortions.
Certain female doctors, extremist midwives, online consultants extol the benefits of painful labor, blame mothers who resort to C-sections and convince them to refuse anesthesia. From Italy, an expose on who they are and why they preach a return to the ancestral nature of motherhood.
In just three months, armed groups in the northeast of the Democratic Republic of Congo killed nearly 500 civilians. The statistics fail to capture the full scale of the suffering, as limited health care access also claims the lives of pregnant women and infants.
The idea of a man carrying a child only receives attention when it is sensationalist or entertaining. But for trans men like me who want to get pregnant, we face discrimination and danger at all levels — from society, the healthcare system, and even from our own communities.
India is one of the world’s worst countries for air pollution, with women more likely to be affected by the problem than men. Now, experts and activists are fighting to reframe pollution as a gendered health crisis.
We’ve heard about the plight of the soldiers-turned-prisoners from Mariupol. Here are some traces of the disturbing fate of a young female doctor who’s been taken away.
The country’s worst economic crisis in decades has toppled the government and led to soaring prices. Pregnant women struggle to access essential supplies.
“There’s still a pulse,” they told me, surprisingly.
Italy’s right-wing politicians are trying to ban surrogacy, as the pope pushes parents to have children and feminists are divided on the issue. On such a complicated issue, hard thinking and nuance have been in short supply.
Barbadian singer and businesswoman Rihanna has proudly celebrated her pregnant belly in fun and revealing clothes. By doing so, she is breaking away from the unspoken rule that pregnant women should hide their baby bumps.
In a culture that can see girls as a burden, many women opt to abort their female fetuses — even though it’s illegal.
BioTexCom is responsible for more than half of the 2,500 surrogate babies born annually in Ukraine. This is how, in the middle of the war, the surrogacy company continues to function.
The in utero impact of high stress during pandemic conditions may last for decades in some babies.
A new program that settles paternity disputes has become the most popular television show in Zimbabwe. Not everyone is happy.
Alice, 28 years old, from Genoa, terminated her pregnancy one year ago. “It is neither a transgression nor disgrace, I only exercised my right to do so.”
Across the globe, travel restrictions, stay-at-home orders and shifting health care priorities have combined to make abortion an even more difficult procedure to obtain.
The pandemic is putting the squeeze on hospitals and clinics, and making things particularly difficult — and dangerous — for pregnant women.
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 […]
When a woman doesn’t drink, we all suspect her of being pregnant. But what happens when that’s true?
A new study found that dozens of São Paulo women infected with Zika gave birth to babies without Microcephaly. Researchers are trying to trace the difference in the effects of the disease in different regions.
-Essay- BERLIN — There we were, a group of female friends in their early 30s sitting around the dinner table one evening and, somehow, the conversation turns to having children. We all agree it would be nice to be a young mother because it is strangely cool being a young mum. But we all have […]
BEIJING — For rich and single Chinese women who want it all, America is there to help. The Beijing-based website Tencent Finance reports that U.S. fertility clinics are increasingly catering to single Chinese women who want to have a child on their own. Annie Liu, a successful high-end real estate dealer in New York, saw […]
BEIJING — It’s been more than a year since China abolished the one-child policy ntroduced in 1979 to control the population. The politburo came up with a new two-child policy and simplified the government-approval process for couples seeking assisted reproductive treatment. The shift prompted older couples to use frozen semen and eggs, and test-tube babies. […]
Only when an abortion is legal, can we begin to speak of moral decisions and love. But men, we are told, are scared and frustrated by these protests. One Polish woman’s frank words for men.
“If only the world’s shattered people carried a sign, a small mark of Cain so that we could be gentler with them, maybe smile a bit more — not to pity them, but to console …”
“Hello fetus listeners …” The Babypod is a speaker that, inserted vaginally, will expose a fetus to music of your choice inside the womb. But what kind of music should we choose?
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 […]
In October, India issued a ban on foreign couples seeking surrogacy there. Now, a proposed law wants to make the entire industry illegal, even for Indian couples. Surrogates and their advocates say it would be a dangerous mistake.
A pregnant Chinese woman must abort her baby, or see her husband fired. After first changes to family planning laws, sweeping reform is now urgently needed.
BEIJING — At a Chinese New Year family celebration, one of Liang Bing’s aunts pulled her aside and cautioned her to be careful not to get pregnant before April. In fact, she continued telling her niece, it would be even better to put off a pregnancy until after May or June. “Giving birth to a […]
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 […]
NEW DELHI — Archana, who is just 15, is desperately trying to put her 3-month-old brother to sleep. He’s crying out for his mother, who died last week after going to a government-run sterilization camp. At least 15 others suffered the same fate, and scores of others are seriously ill after undergoing tubectomies at two Indian sterilization “camps.” Ongoing investigations point to contaminated drugs given to the women as a possible cause of death. But a dirty operating room and surgeries performed in a matter of minutes with unsanitized instruments have raised serious questions about India’s approach to population control […]