‘I was super horny when I made my early work’: Loie Hollowell’s abstract paintings of breasts and vaginas

Equally inspired by childbirth manuals, Georgia O’Keeffe and her own hormones, pregnancy and motherhood, Hollowell paints beautiful anatomical abstractions. She opens up about her cosmic birth and out-of-body experience

‘It’s magical,” says Loie Hollowell. “It’s such good timing!” The artist, speaking via Zoom from her studio in Queens, New York, is referring to the Artemis II moon mission. Little did she know, when she named her latest painting series Overview Effect, after the term used by astronauts to describe the experience of seeing Earth from space and the profound feelings of awe and interconnectedness it provokes, that she’d be coinciding with this space odyssey. But she is not surprised anyone would want to leave Earth for a while. “We’re having so many problems here,” she says.

Overview Effect, currently at London’s Pace Gallery, features large-scale canvases combining twin concave and convex sculpted circles. If you folded the canvasses in half vertically, the halves would fit perfectly together. The works, which radiate outwards in rings of glorious colour that are both vibrant and soothing, are a continuation of earlier works focusing on pregnancy and birth through abstraction. Her Split Orb paintings and Dilation Stage series of pastel drawings responded to the difficult birth of her son in a New York hospital. Overview Effect is a result of her daughter’s easier arrival: a “cosmic” home birth that she found far more empowering.

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Home blood pressure checks could reduce risks after hypertensive pregnancy

Study finds monitoring and adjustment of medication where needed can help protect mothers’ heart health

New mothers who had hypertension in pregnancy could reduce their risk of heart attack, stroke and potentially early death through daily blood pressure checks at home, research suggests.

Women who regularly monitored their blood pressure in the weeks after giving birth, and had doctors tailor their medication if needed, had better functioning arteries nine months later than those who received routine care, scientists found.

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Kindness of strangers: I was so pregnant I couldn’t see my feet when a woman offered to tie my shoelace

As an expectant mother bringing a little person into the world, you want to feel it is mostly filled with good people. In that moment I felt reassured

• Read more in the kindness of strangers series

It was my first pregnancy and I’d been sick for more than seven months with hyperemesis gravidarum. In those late stages, after the HG finally passed, I was exhausted and overwhelmed. It was the dual feeling of excitement and trepidation. Was I ready to have a baby when I’d only just got used to waddling around and the discomfort of pregnancy?

One day I was at the shops and not feeling great. As I was walking down an aisle, a woman came up behind me. I assumed she was going to ask me to move or make a not-super-friendly comment. Instead, she said: “Do you know that your shoelace is undone?” I didn’t – I couldn’t see my feet! – and thanked her for letting me know.

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I yearned to be a mother. Why did I feel nothing when my daughter was finally born?

I had presumed I would love her instantly – but a traumatic birth led to devastating numbness

It wasn’t supposed to be like this. I was waiting for an overwhelming rush of love, but when I looked at my newborn baby what I felt was utter despair. No matter how much I smiled at her, crooned at her, fed, patted, caressed and changed her, I was absolutely numb.

I had yearned for her. Growing up in Italy, I was surrounded by images of perfect motherhood. Every rural crossroad has its tiny shrine to the Madonna and Child. I was certain by the end of my teens that I wanted to have at least one baby.

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Why aren’t Republicans thrilled by the fall in teen pregnancies? | Arwa Mahdawi

In the US, the birth rate for 15- to 19-year-olds dropped 7% last year. But what seems like good news for society has been lamented by some leading Maga figures

Teenagers these days, eh? Instead of having unprotected sex and popping out babies, they’re wasting their time on TikTok, or something. According to a recent report, the teenage birth rate in the US fell by 7% in 2025. While this might seem like a positive development, it has been a cause of dismay among the Maga-adjacent crowd.

Take Fox News, which ran a segment framing the drop in teen pregnancies as alarming. “We still have 3.6 million births a year,” noted the medical analyst Marc Siegel. “But the problem is teens and young adults. From ages 15 to 19, the fertility rate is down 7%, and it’s down 70% over the last two decades, meaning we’re telling people that are young not to have babies, to wait until they’re in a more stable life situation.” I’m sorry, that’s a problem?

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Taking Tylenol during pregnancy has no link to autism, new study finds

Trump has pushed unfounded claims of Tylenol use in pregnancy being tied to ‘a very increased risk of autism’

Taking acetaminophen – known in the US by the brand name Tylenol – during pregnancy has no effect on later autism diagnoses, according to a sweeping new study from Denmark published on Monday.

The Trump administration has targeted Tylenol use in pregnancy as a major cause of autism in children, which appears to have led to a drop in pregnant people taking the pain reliever.

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Black women in Georgia turn to midwives for safer births – so why does the state criminalize many of them?

A new lawsuit seeks to decriminalize the work of midwives banned from providing care amid a worsening maternal health crisis

When Tamara Taitt moved to Georgia in 2023 to run the Atlanta Birth Center, she found herself in what she calls “an extraordinary position”. Under Georgia law, the center’s own executive director cannot provide routine clinical care for the center’s own clients. She could even face criminal charges for doing so.

Taitt is a nationally accredited midwife. She directs one of the only freestanding birth centers in the state – a destination for women seeking to give birth outside a hospital, cared for by midwives rather than obstetricians. Families choose birth centers to access more holistic, less medicalized prenatal care and birth, and to avoid invasive medical interventions in a state where C-sections occur at three times the rate recommended by the World Health Organization.

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