As every expecting parent learns to their dismay, modern medicine cannot accurately predict when your baby will arrive. The optimistically named “due date” is, from a predictive standpoint, fiction. Only 5% of births occur on the actual due date, and about two-thirds fall within a week before or after the due date. Not knowing when […]

Skin so translucent and fragile it tears like tissue paper. Faces obscured by oxygen masks. Alarms going off very few minutes. Bassinets covered in plastic wrap.  This is the world of babies born extremely preterm—at less than 28 weeks of pregnancy. Yet for all the almost sinister machines surrounding these tiny humans–tubes and incubators, oxygen […]

I knock gently on the door in the post-delivery unit, and enter to find a new mother trying to latch her baby. It’s not going well, and I can tell she’s stressed. And standing a bit off to the side is the baby’s father, looking unsure of where he fits into this picture.  As a hospital-based […]

(*Trigger warning*: this story is about pregnancy loss.) When I recently reached out on social media to find women who had experienced preeclampsia, Kerry was one of the first to reply. A sharp, vivacious, and vibrant 36-year-old nurse practitioner, Kerry seems like the last person you’d imagine developing preeclampsia, a poorly understood pregnancy condition characterized […]

Last month, the measles outbreak in Washington State prompted its governor to declare a state of emergency. Some parents have wised up and finally vaccinated their kids. But others have dug in, even gathering to protest universal vaccine policies. As a researcher who knows how thoroughly the autism-vaccine hypothesis has been debunked*, it’s hard to watch […]

Still thinking about Zika in 2018? Thanks to that research, we now have good answers for many of the earlier questions on the things to know about Zika and pregnancy.

Infographic - Six ways you can show your friend on bed rest some love.

Was my labor "normal"? What we know, what we don't know, and what we need to know about science of labor.

Every mother deserves a safe pregnancy and birth.

Why the Bloom family is donating to Every Mother Counts in honor of our moms this Mother's Day