NHS in England failing to record ethnicity of those who sue over maternity care

‘Shocking blind spot’ in data collection comes despite ‘well-documented racial disparities in maternity care’

The NHS is facing criticism for not recording the ethnicity of people who sue it over poor maternity care, despite black, Asian and minority ethnic women experiencing much greater harm during childbirth.

Health experts, patient safety campaigners and lawyers claim racial disparities in maternity care are so stark that NHS bodies in England must start collating details of people who take legal action to help ensure services improve.

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What is America’s pro-natalism movement really about? | Moira Donegan

The movement isn’t actually interested in making motherhood easier by offering things like affordable childcare. So what is their aim?

Malcolm and Simone Collins, the pro-natalist couple who are reportedly consulting the Donald Trump administration on how to encourage American women to have more babies, are something of a deliberate heel: they often seem to be attempting to provoke the ire of their audience. The couple espouse the pro-natalism that is sweeping the political right with an explicit eugenicist tilt (self-styled “elites,” the Collins scan their IVF-generated embryos before their pregnancies, in an effort to select for features like high IQ). They dress in the severe black outfits of German modernists, with an emphasis on the “German” part, and wear large, unusually shaped eyeglasses; Simone has also taken to wearing large bonnets that make her look like Mother Goose, or, in their less subtle versions, like an extra on The Handmaid’s Tale.”The pair met on Reddit.

The founders of a pro-birth organization, the Collins’ assert that there is a crisis of declining birth rates in America. (In reality, the slight dip in America’s birth rate is almost entirely due to the decline of teen pregnancies.) They aim to fix this in part by breeding as many of their own children as possible: they currently have four, blameless innocents they have cruelly burdened with names like “Industry Americus” and “Torsten Savage.” But they seem to be more adept at siring media profiles of themselves, of which there have been many. The couple insist upon their own genetic superiority, like a breeding-obsessed Boris and Natasha. They aim to advance a future of more babies and – by their own terms – better ones: what Simone calls “genetically selected humans”. They must be doing it on purpose: no one could become so off-putting by accident.

Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist.

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Number of births in US increased by 1% in 2024, according to CDC data

Small increase amounts to 3.6 million births and an increase in the women aged 40-44 giving birth

The number of births in the US increased slightly in 2024 to roughly 3.6 million, according to provisional data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

The small increase of 1% in the number of births comes amid a long-term decline that began during the Great Recession, in about 2008. The provisional data was released on Wednesday.

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Microplastics found in human ovary follicular fluid for the first time

Peer-reviewed study’s findings raises fresh question on the toxic substances’ impact on fertility

Microplastics have been found for the first time in human ovary follicular fluid, raising a new round of questions about the ubiquitous and toxic substances’ potential impact on women’s fertility.

The new peer-reviewed research published in Ecotoxicology and Environmental Safety checked for microplastics in the follicular fluid of 18 women undergoing assisted reproductive treatment at a fertility clinic in Salerno, Italy, and detected them in 14.

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Black maternal health is about more than survival – it’s about thriving | Venice Haynes

Too often, healthcare ignores our pain and fails to value our lives. But communities are banding together to meet our needs

Maternal deaths have recently dropped in the US – that is, unless you’re Black.

Black women continue to face the highest rates of maternal mortality in our country. To be Black, pregnant and hopeful in the US is to hold on to life with a fierce and unyielding grip against devastating odds.

Venice Haynes is a social and behavioral scientist with more than 17 years of public health experience. She is the senior director of research and community engagement for United States of Care

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Rogue doctors stole one woman’s eggs to get another patient pregnant. What happened next is an unlikely tale of friendship against the odds

When it emerged that a fertility clinic had made one woman pregnant with another’s baby, Renée Ballou and Carole LieberWilkins were advised to ‘lawyer up’. Instead they did something extraordinary – even as one raised the other’s biological child

Renée Ballou thought she was a lucky person. In the 1980s, she was living in a beautiful home an hour’s drive from Los Angeles, with a job she loved, a happy marriage and a young son. Everything had always felt so easy for Renée – until she began trying for a second child. Two years on, she still wasn’t pregnant. “I was pretty much used to getting what I wanted,” Renée, now 67, tells me with a sad smile. “It was very stressful.”

Along with her husband, Wesley, Renée went through a battery of tests, followed by years of surgeries, supplements and hormones. Her gynaecologist referred them to Dr Sergio Stone, a fertility specialist at the University of California, Irvine (UCI) in Orange County, for more treatment. They tried artificial insemination – first with Wesley’s sperm, then with a donor – without success. Their son, Matthew, was four when they started trying for a sibling for him; by 1987 he was 10. It was lonely and emotionally and physically gruelling. But Renée refused to give up. “I wanted that baby more than anything.”

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Woman gives birth to stranger’s baby after IVF bungle in Brisbane

Mistake at Queensland fertility care clinic results in woman unknowingly giving birth to another patient’s baby after embryos mixed up

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A woman has given birth to another person’s baby after their fertility care provider mixed up their embryos.

Monash IVF, which operates across Australia, has apologised after a patient at one of its Brisbane clinics had an embryo incorrectly transferred to her, meaning she gave birth to a child of another woman.

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A lifesaving midwife in Afghanistan: Noriko Hayashi’s best photograph

‘This woman was nine months pregnant but had never had a checkup. Anisa is listening to the baby’s heartbeat with a stethoscope. After foreign aid cuts, including Trump’s, she is now out of a job’

My home country, Japan, is one of the safest places in the world to give birth: it has one of the very lowest mortality rates in Asia. A few years ago I had the opportunity to work on a story about midwives in Japan, and I became very interested in their role. In November 2023 I travelled to Badakhshan province in the northeast of Afghanistan, the country with the highest maternal mortality rate in Asia. I wanted to meet midwives there and see how they support women.

The Badakhshan province is far from Kabul, with rugged terrain and poor transportation and medical infrastructure. In winter, heavy snowfall blocks roads for months. Women who are about to give birth are sometimes carried on donkeys escorted by family members or neighbours on multi-day trips to clinics. The literacy rate for women there is extremely low compared to other provinces – less than 10% – which is partly why there’s a serious shortage of midwives. This combination of geographic, social and cultural factors means there are often delays responding to emergencies, and deaths from complications like excessive bleeding or infection, which might otherwise have been preventable.

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Woman becomes first UK womb transplant recipient to give birth – video

Surgeons are hailing an ‘astonishing’ medical breakthrough as a woman became the first in the UK to give birth after a womb transplant. Grace Davidson, 36, who was a teenager when diagnosed with a rare condition that meant she did not have a uterus, said she and her husband, Angus, 37, had been given ‘the greatest gift we could ever have asked for’. They named their five-week-old girl Amy Isabel – after Grace’s sister, Amy Purdie, who donated her womb during an eight-hour operation in 2023, and Isabel Quiroga, a surgeon who helped perfect the transplant technique. More than 100 womb transplants have been carried out worldwide, with at least 50 babies thought to have been born as a result

• Woman becomes first UK womb transplant recipient to give birth

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Woman becomes first UK womb transplant recipient to give birth

Grace Davidson gives birth to baby Amy Isabel after receiving her sister’s womb in 2023

Surgeons are hailing an “astonishing” medical breakthrough as a woman became the first in the UK to give birth after a womb transplant.

Grace Davidson, 36, who was a teenager when diagnosed with a rare condition that meant she did not have a uterus, said she and her husband, Angus, 37, had been given “the greatest gift we could ever have asked for”.

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Aid cuts could have ‘pandemic-like effects’ on maternal deaths, WHO warns

Loss of funding could undo progress in reducing deaths in pregnancy and childbirth, especially in war zones, says UN

More women risk dying in pregnancy and childbirth because of aid cuts by wealthy countries, which could have “pandemic-like effects”, UN agencies have warned.

Pregnant women in conflict zones are the most vulnerable, and face an “alarmingly high” risk that is already five times greater than elsewhere, according to a new UN report on trends in maternal mortality.

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Trump administration eviscerates maternal and child health programs

Alarm over ‘the health of the nation’s children’ follows federal workforce cuts by health secretary RFK Jr

Multiple maternal and child health programs have been eliminated or hollowed out as part of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) layoffs, prompting alarm and disbelief among advocates working to make Americans healthier.

The fear and anxiety come as a full accounting of the cuts remains elusive. Federal health officials have released only broad descriptions of changes to be made, rather than a detailed accounting of the programs and departments being eviscerated.

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Charges dropped against US woman found unconscious after miscarriage

Selena Maria Chandler-Scott was arrested in Georgia after emergency responders were called in to treat her

The charges against a Georgia woman who was found bleeding and unconscious after a miscarriage were dropped on Friday.

The woman, 24-year-old Selena Maria Chandler-Scott, was arrested late last month after emergency responders were called in to treat her, according to a police press release.

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