Whale Birth on Video

Ok, so it has to do with birth, but not human birth.
It surprised me that the baby whale came out tail first. I knew that four-footed mammals are born feet-first (I suppose so that their necks don’t break from the drop — I’m picturing a standing giraffe dropping its newborn offspring headfirst — yikes!), but [...]

Lamaze International

Many of you may associate the word “Lamaze” with the “hee-hee-hooooo” breathing made popular in the late 70s and early 80s. It’s much more than that now. Go check out their website, but especially the new weekly pregnancy newsletter.

Putting Women in Control

This is such a great article! In a nutshell — when women need a vaginal exam with a speculum, they insert the speculum themselves. Read the article, and next time you find yourself in that oh-so-wonderful position (feet in here… okay, slide a little bit lower, lower…) you can tell the doctor or midwife that [...]

Tricks of the Infant Food Industry

This is sort-of a follow-up to a recent post on artificial breastmilk (infant formula). Here’s the link to an article that talks more about it (thanks, Dale!). Just mind-boggling.
While U.S. infants can survive on formula, many third-world infants cannot. Not only is drinking water scarce or disease-ridden in many areas, but formula is so expensive [...]

The Birth Survey

If you are pregnant, or gave birth within the last 3 years, you have the opportunity to participate in an exciting project! Go to The Birth Survey website to find out more about it.
There is so much on the website, it’s impossible to just pull out the best parts, because then I’d end up copying [...]

Artificial infant food

(good only for artificial babies!)
This was interesting — the Wikipedia article on Infant formula. I know a lot of people don’t like Wikipedia, but there are citations throughout the article, and it certainly does a good job of encapsulating the topic “in a nutshell.”
In reading one of many breastfeeding books, one of the authors noted [...]

A comment about comments

I have several posts in queue, since I am in the middle of the summer busy season, and won’t be online regularly. If you have posted a comment before, your comment should appear immediately; if you haven’t, then your comment will go to moderation. I have noticed lately that WordPress (or Akismet) has been sending some [...]

CDC Statistics

The CDC has finally gotten an on-line searchable query for 2003-2004 linked birth-death infant records. If you’re into this sort of thing, you can look at the stats based on so many different factors — age of mother, gestational age of baby, race, mother’s marital status, etc. You can look at the cause of death [...]

Infant Mortality Rate, by country

Just in case you’re interested, here’s the CIA World Factbook link for the world’s infant mortality rates.
I may discuss this on a later post, but the US ranks 180 out of 222. The order is reversed, which means that we’re #42 — 41 other countries have fewer children who die in their first year of [...]

The AMA on Home Births

I read the story; and then when I searched for the actual document, the link took me to a file for downloading, instead of to a website. Here is the link, but if for some reason it doesn’t work, you can google “Resolution 205 on Home Deliveries” and get it — it’s the top link.
But [...]