Couple sought out gender selection treatment, which is illegal in Australia, after having three boys
With three sons already, Jayne Cornwill and her husband Jon were intent on having a baby girl to complete their “family puzzle”.
So much so, when it came to a fourth child, the couple decided to travel to the US for gender selection treatment – a controversial procedure banned in Australia.
Health experts have highlighted a new approach in the fight against obesity: they want to target future mothers and advise them how to avoid giving birth to overweight children.
By helping women even before pregnancy, a key step could be taken to tackle Britain’s rising levels of obesity, according to a report published by the Infant and Toddler Forum last week.
Dressing for the festive period is always tricky. When you’re pregnant, it is a minefield. Here are some top tips to see you through every seasonal occasion in style
Just because you’re shaped like a bauble, it doesn’t mean you have to look like one.
There are lots of exciting things about being pregnant. But maternity wear is certainly not one of them. Despite more fashion-forward brands than ever before, we mothers-to-be are still faced with a homogeneous sea of dark jersey and horrendous nana bras. And at no other time of year will those of us lugging a bump around feel the injustice of this more keenly than in the runup to Christmas. When the shops are awash with sparkly sequins, jewel colours and jolly jumpers, we’re left to forlornly nose through a couple of racks of black stretchy dresses and maternity jeans.
As crimes go, abandoning a newborn in a drain is awful. Cases like this are exceedingly rare, but our society’s neglect of mothers makes them possible
A woman has been charged with the attempted murder of her newborn son, whom police say she left for dead in a drain on Tuesday before he was found on Sunday by passersby. As crimes go, it’s horrific. Babies are fragile, dependent on the care of others for their every need. No matter how bad things get, we are still shocked when someone callously disregards a newborn’s safety.
There’s a temptation to dismiss this crime as a rarity. But crimes don’t happen in isolation. Australia routinely fails to provide critical psychiatric and prenatal care for new mothers. The fate of this newborn boy has a place within Australian society, with blame we must shoulder.
Somewhere, in an isolated room in a London hospital, is a small, frozen container, stored within a nitrogen tank, which has my name on it. Whether my name appears in a literal sense is debatable. I have never seen it. Its hold over me, however, is personal and continuous. It contains the frozen sperm of an anonymous donor of my choice.
In autumn 2012, I began in earnest to consider becoming a single mother.
Curtis and Glenna Boyd have worked in US abortion clinics ever since Roe v Wade made the practice legal in 1973. Forty years on, restricted rights mean they have to practise under FBI protection
A couple emerge from a silver Sedan into an empty parking lot in north-eastern Dallas, Texas. They are carrying multiple bags and an elegant, three-tiered white cage, temporary home to their West African parrot, Tutu. The pair, in their late-60s and 70s, share a courtly, gentle manner and a Southern drawl, although his is more pronounced.
It is a Sunday morning, and the smart brick and smoked-glass clinic they have parked outside is closed. There are none of the protesters who, in the US, have come to signal the type of healthcare provided here: from the religiously motivated to abuse-hurling zealots, who gather outside abortion providers, particularly in the Bible belt. It is difficult to imagine the couple, Curtis Boyd, a silver-haired preacher-turned-physician, or his wife, Glenna Halvorson-Boyd, a psychologist and counsellor, on an FBI watch list as potential domestic terrorism targets. But they are.
I helped promote abused childrens entitlement to criminal injuries compensation and a local authoritys duty to make application on behalf of children in their care. Both your editorial (6 November) and Simon Jenkins (Opinion, 7 November) assert that any compensation received would alleviate the burden on the council and be to their benefit. The implication is that councils are pursuing these applications in their self-interest. Upon what evidence are these statements based? My understanding is that any award would be directly to the child concerned. While it may be put in trust until the child achieves majority, it could not simply be used by the council to offset any costs of its statutory duty of care.
In raising the matter as far back as 1988, I sought to highlight the parlous situation of many children leaving care with little support, financial or otherwise. Would your writers not wish to pursue any avenue that might benefit a child who has suffered harm at the hands of another person? The issues of whether a foetus can have a legal identity and whether a crime has been committed are difficult, but its wrong to criticise a council for seeking to further the interests of a child in its care if there is an arguable case. For them to do otherwise would truly be a proper cause for concern.
Peter Ferguson
Castle Heather, Inverness
The apartment block opposite mine in New York is having its balconies refurbished, and every day men in a three-sided window-washing cart are hoisted up the side of the building to work on it. I see them now outside the 18th floor, struggling to anchor the rig to the wall with only a thin plastic mesh between them and oblivion.
Yesterdays footage of two men dangling in a broken cart outside the 68th floor of the new World Trade Center was a reminder of how dangerous a job this still is. According to Adam Higginbotham in the New Yorker last year, most of the window washers are South American. Its a close-knit community, passing down family lines, like fire-fighting. The first window-washing scaffold was introduced only in 1952. Before that, men would simply stand on a ledge and hang on by their finger tips.
One in seven women in countries hit by the Ebola epidemic could die in pregnancy or childbirth because hospital services are overwhelmed, say charities.
Sierra Leone, Liberia and Guinea were among the countries with the highest maternal mortality rates in the world before Ebola broke out, but they were improving - women were more likely to go to a health facility to give birth and be delivered by a skilled health worker or midwife and their care was free of charge.
If poisoning your foetus with alcohol is a crime, why is it not a crime to abort it? If alcoholism in pregnancy is attempted manslaughter, as a QC told the court of appeal this week, surely abortion is murder. Indeed if alcoholism before birth criminally harms a babys life, what about alcoholism and a dozen other cruelties after birth? How many are the misdeeds we inflict on our children to which Britains cult of criminality should now turn its attention?
We need a philosopher as Raymond Chandler would say and we need one fast. All we get are bloody lawyers. The motive for this weeks court case in London had nothing to do with the health of mother or child. It was blatantly financial. A local council is acting on behalf of a seven-year-old girl CP who suffers from acute foetal alcohol syndrome. The claimed cause was her mothers drinking during pregnancy. The suit is intended to shift the cost of caring for her from the council to the Criminal Injuries Compensation Authority on the grounds that the girl is victim of violence against the person.
Should women who drink excessively while pregnant be criminalised? That question is at the root of a legal test case whose ruling is expected later this month: it concerns a seven-year-old child with foetal alcohol syndrome (FAS). Lawyers acting on her behalf are arguing that she is entitled to a payout from the government-funded Criminal Injuries Compensation Scheme because her medical condition is directly linked to her mothers drinking habits during pregnancy.
Since in UK law foetuses have no rights, its hard to imagine that compensation will be granted to do so would change the whole basis of the way the unborn are regarded in our society. But leaving that aside, and given that FAS is entirely preventable, and leaves a child with a severely compromised life, is this something we should be open to rethinking?
The law takes some odd turns, but claiming that a woman who drinks during pregnancy might be behaving criminally towards her unborn child is reaching for the absurd. Yet that is more or less where lawyers in the court of appeal are heading by arguing that a pregnant womans alcoholism is equivalent to attempted manslaughter of her unborn daughter. The aim is to win a payout from the Criminal Injuries Compensation Authority, which would lift a burden from the council that pays for the childs care now. It would also risk making any woman who drinks to excess in pregnancy a potential criminal.
The legal case rests on the argument that a foetus has an existence as a person with rights that can be balanced against its mothers. This is an argument that, in recognition of the unique biological relationship between a mother and her foetus, has always been denied. But if it were accepted, then the local authority could claim that a mothers drinking amounted to a criminal act against her daughter, for which the child could get compensation. There are said to be 80 similar cases in the pipeline.
Binge-drinking in pregnancy is harmful to the baby in the womb that much is undisputed. Foetal alcohol syndrome is well-studied and talked about and can lead to facial deformities, liver, kidney and heart problems, cerebral palsy and other serious health issues.
The damage occurs in the early weeks of a pregnancy and only if the woman is drinking very heavily. But the existence of this fairly rare syndrome, with devastating effects on the unborn child, influences much of the debate around whether it is safe for pregnant women to drink alcohol at all, although experts also focus on an increased risk of miscarriage in the first three months.
Severe damage inflicted on an unborn baby by her mothers heavy drinking during pregnancy was equivalent to attempted manslaughter, the court of appeal has been told.
Opening a claim for compensation on behalf of the girl, now seven, lawyers argued that she was entitled to payments from the Criminal Injuries Compensation Authority.
