Australia has protocols for stillbirths and neonatal deaths, but the quality of care varies widely across the country
The birth of Allanah Crameri and Braydon Newell’s son Lenny in September 2022 should have been filled with joy. But at just under 22 weeks, pregnancy complications led to a preterm labour and Lenny was born too early to survive.
“I felt everything from sadness, despair, anger and shock,” Crameri says.
Continue reading...Officer detained woman and confiscated mattress from under a Louisville overpass after she said her water broke
A homeless woman in Kentucky was cited by police and had her mattress confiscated and destroyed as she went into labor on the streets of Louisville, local media reported.
Body camera footage obtained by Kentucky Public Radio from the city police force showed Lt Caleb Stewart walking up to a pregnant woman under an overpass in the city’s downtown area.
Continue reading...While the risk of a H5N1 pandemic in humans is low, ‘it’s really important to think about vulnerable populations’, says Melbourne researcher
Most pregnant women who contract bird flu will die, according to an Australian review of infections that found most unborn babies with the virus also die.
Caused by influenza A viruses, a severe strain of bird flu known as Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza A (H5N1) is spreading globally.
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Continue reading...Abused as a child, barely able to support herself as an adult, Maria Arbuckle was one of thousands of unmarried women who suffered in Ireland’s mother and baby homes. She talks about her long battle to be reunited with her son – and the tragedy that struck soon after
When Maria Arbuckle thinks of her time in Ireland’s largest mother and baby home, she thinks of the nursery and its snug rows of cots, each one filled with a tiny, bleating bundle. She thinks of her boy, Paul, among them, and the 8lb 10oz weight of him in her arms. She thinks of how she fed and washed him under the careful watch of the Daughters of Charity of Saint Vincent de Paul. And she thinks of the refrain that ended each visit, when she had to hand him back to them: “He’s not yours any more. He doesn’t belong to you.”
Arbuckle, 62, was six months pregnant when she was sent by social services in Northern Ireland to Saint Patrick’s mother and baby home over the border in Dublin. She was 18 and emerging from a childhood spent shunted between a children’s home, an abusive foster home and a church-run industrial school for children considered to be in “moral danger”. It was 1981, Northern Ireland was in the thick of the Troubles and she was living in the border county of Monaghan, far from her native Derry. Her first serious relationship had collapsed, she had no contact with the foster family who had raised her for 11 years and she was barely making ends meet with her traineeship with a bookmaker. “At the mother and baby home, they told me that I had nowhere to go,” she recalls, more than four decades later. “I was on my own. I had no man, no family. And they were right.”
Continue reading...The only hospital in the country using foetal safety software has seen baby fatalities drop by 82% in three years
When Ellen Kaphamtengo felt a sharp pain in her lower abdomen, she thought she might be in labour. It was the ninth month of her first pregnancy and she wasn’t taking any chances. With the help of her mother, the 18-year-old climbed on to a motorcycle taxi and rushed to a hospital in Malawi’s capital, Lilongwe, a 20-minute ride away.
At the Area 25 health centre, they told her it was a false alarm and took her to the maternity ward. But things escalated quickly when a routine ultrasound revealed that her baby was much smaller than expected for her pregnancy stage, which can cause asphyxia – a condition that limits blood flow and oxygen to the baby.
Continue reading...Babies are big business, with a bamboozling array of products to cater to them. Here, five families with young children share their shopping regrets, and the items that actually helped
A bottle warmer? A baby food maker? A breast pump? If you’re preparing to welcome a baby into your life, it can be overwhelming to know exactly what items are worth buying.
After all, baby products are big business. According to Ibisworld, in Australia the market size of online baby product sales has grown almost 8% annually over the past five years, with the industry estimated to generate $1.6bn in revenue in 2024.
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