The maternie Database:
We collect a lot of women’s health news, every weekday. This is where you’ll find everything we’ve rounded up and reported on pregnancy. Want to get this news in your inbox, as soon as we find it? Sign up above.
Senate Democrats called out Republicans for proposing a federal pregnancy database.
The story of cognitive neuroscientist Liz Chirastil, who made herself a guinea pig in her own experiment by getting 26 MRIs throughout her pregnancy and for two years after.
The so-called clinics promote “abortion pill reversal,” which doesn’t have medical or scientific evidence to back it up.
Erin Hirshberg writes a devastating but beautiful essay on having a stillbirth at 36 weeks
a deep dive on why hospitals are closing OBGYN units throughout the country, and the answer isn’t the fall of Roe making obstetrical care legally dangerous. It’s far simpler than that: money.
Supreme Court justices seemed split mainly along ideological lines during oral arguments over a federal requirement that hospitals provide emergency care to stabilize a patient, including abortions when necessary.
A study of over 2 million teenagers in Canada found that those who carried a pregnancy to term were more than twice as likely to die before their 31st birthday, even after controlling for pre-existing health conditions and other demographics.
The United States’ maternal mortality rate is the worst in the world among wealthy countries. But a new analysis of CDC statistics makes the case that the rate is around 10 deaths per 100,000 births—not the nearly 33 deaths per 100,000 births reported around this time last year.
Smart ring Oura is introducing a new pregnancy feature, which will allow wearers to track gestational age and “offer weekly updates on what physiological changes are expected,” like “unusual sleep patterns and heart rate differences.”
A deep dive on Idaho becoming an “OBGYN desert.” At the end of March, the third labor and delivery unit in the state will close since Roe fell.
There is a “four week window where a person might not be pregnant yet—but according to how we measure weeks of pregnancy they already are.”
After passage of the Affordable Care Act, Democratic-leaning states generally chose to expand Medicaid, while Republican-leaning states did not. That set up a natural study to see how better access to healthcare affected moms with gestational diabetes and their babies.
An essay from Eleanor Barker-White on experiencing “vanishing twin syndrome”, when one fetus is absorbed by the other in the womb.
A JAMA study of 200,000 babies adds more evidence to the fact that pregnant women who get the COVID-19 vaccine protect their babies from complications
Pregnancy doesn’t just make your heart beat more or increase your blood volume – it “dramatically rewires every major organ” in the body.
A study in Obstetrics & Gynecology finds that Black women are “about 10 percent less likely to receive [an epidural] during labor” when compared with white women.
A lovely, thought-provoking essay from writer Laura Barton on unexpectedly becoming a mom at 45, after years of trying through miscarriages and fertility treatments.
Extreme Republicans are holding up a government funding bill and insisting a food program for women and children that has been funded for decades not get a budget increase this year, despite increasing food prices.
More women joined a case in Tennessee challenging the state’s abortion ban, similar to a case brought in Texas.
A digital stethoscope enhanced with AI helped identify twice as many cases of peripartum cardiomyopathy than traditional care.