Ten babies are stillborn every day in England, Wales and Northern Ireland causing lasting distress to the bereaved parents and mystifying doctors, a report released yesterday said.

The rate…

An Algerian woman gave birth to seven babies at a public hospital in the capital Algiers, the health ministry spokesman said on Thursday.

The mother gave birth to a boy…

Mental health problems, such as anxiety disorders and depression, are common in women who smoke during pregnancy and may be part of the reason they do so, researchers have found.

Parents who are smokers when they conceive a child are far more likely to have girls than boys, an extensive study by paediatricians has found. The chance…

Pregnant women who gain excessive or even appropriate weight, according to current guidelines, are four times more likely than women who gain inadequate weight to have a baby…

For the first time ever, a team of Toronto researchers are using a combination of ultrasound and blood tests to screen high-risk pregnant mothers for placental damage. By completing these non-invasive…

A UK population-based study of risk factors for first-trimester miscarriage confirms the importance of established risk factors, such as maternal age, and finds no support for popular beliefs about the…

In Hispanic women, four gene variants are linked to spontaneous preterm birth, according to abstracts presented by researchers at Yale School of Medicine and Washington University at…

To address the high rate of multiple births resulting from in-vitro-fertilization (IVF), researchers at Yale School of Medicine and McGill University have developed a procedure that estimates the…

Belinda Hardman completed the study for her PhD with Deakin’s Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology under the supervision of Dr Leigh Ackland.

Ms Hardman is the first to find that…

Women who smoke during pregnancy may cause permanent damage to their child’s blood vessels that can be detected in young adulthood and which may increase the child’s risk of cardiovascular disease,…

For a woman trying to conceive, the best prescription could be a knickerbocker glory. It might play havoc with her diet but the old-fashioned confection, made with cream and…

An “extremely high” proportion of pregnant women living in the northern United States, and their newborns, have insufficient vitamin D levels, and taking prenatal vitamins may not increase vitamin D levels…

Even regular use of prenatal multivitamin supplements is not adequate to prevent vitamin D insufficiency, University of Pittsburgh researchers report in the current issue of the Journal of Nutrition, the publication…

If pregnancy occurs too soon after a woman undergoes a common minor surgery to the cervix, there appears to be a heightened chance of preterm birth, researchers report in the journal…

A think-tank has criticised the government’s teenage pregnancy policy after new figures showed a rise in the number of under-16s becoming pregnant.

A total of 7,462 under-16 girls in England…

People who were breastfed as infants climb the social-class ladder more readily as adults than those who were bottle-fed babies, UK researchers report.

Dr. Richard M. Martin and colleagues from the…

Adverse outcomes in the next birth are more common among women who deliver their first child by cesarean section than those who deliver their first child vaginally, according…

African-American women are three times more likely to deliver babies three to 17 weeks prematurely than Caucasian women, according to a review of Missouri birth statistics by researchers at…

A Queen’s-led study shows that giving nitroglycerin to women who enter labour early results in significant improvement to their babies’ health. The improvement is most…

The first researchers to use magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to study the brains of a large group of babies soon after birth found a small amount of bleeding in…

There is no evidence that moderate levels of caffeine consumption during pregnancy lead to a greater risk of premature births and underweight babies despite…

Although they were prescribed widely in the 1960s to women looking to avoid dangerously high blood pressure during pregnancy, diuretic drugs should not be recommended as a way to prevent…

France’s fertility rate has risen to the highest level in 30 years, with women having an average of two children each, official data showed on Tuesday.

In a demographic survey,…

A woman in Poland gave birth this week to a baby weighing more than seven kg (15 lb), which doctors said was a record size for a Polish newborn.