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Blog
In this video, we’re going to talk about birth control and how it might be affecting your desire. I love birth control. I think the fact that women get to choose when and when not to have a baby is so exciting, and it makes such a difference...
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Pregnancy
If you are pregnant and planning for your delivery, you may or may not have heard of birth plans. A birth plan is simply a document to help expectant parents communicate their wishes during labor and delivery to their healthcare providers. In a...
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Blog
Is it possible to get pregnant while on birth control? One mom-to-be wonders what effects the pill will have on her unborn child. Another mom is unsure about how to get vaccines for her children as they travel abroad this summer. See what our...
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Blog
Every year the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) releases statistics about the previous year’s births. The report for 2014 was just released, and below are some of the more interesting findings for this past year: Overall, the birth...
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Parenting
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Pregnancy
With the coronavirus pandemic in full swing, it is only natural to want to avoid stepping foot inside a hospital. However, what about when it comes time to deliver your baby? Would it be better to skip the hospital and deliver at home? Home births...
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Blog
Giving birth is wonderful, but it also means big changes when you get home with that baby and you’re wearing enormous pads, you’re bleeding, your baby is crying, you’re crying, and everybody is running around. In this Facebook Live event, supported...
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Pregnancy
If you’re about to give birth, surely your friends and family have told you exactly what their deliveries were like — and how yours should go, too. After reading the books and searching Dr. Google, it can be hard to separate fact from fiction. Here...
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Pregnancy
While it is true that we don’t completely understand why labor really begins, there are some things that can make your chance of giving birth preterm — or before 37 weeks gestation — much more likely. Here’s a list of issues that can lead to...
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Blog
When I got pregnant with my first child, I’d just moved far away from home, and my mother had recently died. I decided to hire a doula to give me support through pregnancy and labor. My husband and I lived in a “free spirit” area of Northern...
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Blog
Zika virus has been in the news quite a bit recently, and with good reason: since an increase in microcephaly (a birth defect where a baby develops an abnormally small head and brain) was noted in Brazil last year, there have been concerns that an...
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Pregnancy
It’s normal to be a little scared of the unknown, and giving birth is no exception. In this day and age, when everyone shares every detail of giving birth, it is not uncommon to hear horror stories and wonder if you can handle the labor and...
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Pregnancy
A submersion birth is exactly what it sounds like: giving birth while partially submerged, usually in a bathtub or a special submersion birth tub found in some hospitals and birthing centers. Already popular overseas, submersion births have been...
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Community
A new review has just come out and has found evidence that taking an antidepressant (especially in the 3rd trimester) increases a woman’s risk of given birth prematurely: A summary (and link to original study in the article) can be found...
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Baby
If you are breastfeeding and do not want to become pregnant, you should consider using some form of birth control unless you meet all of the strict criteria for lactational amenorrhea. With so many contraceptive options out there, it is important...
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Community
Have any of you seen this study that came out this week about the increased risk of glaucoma in women who take birth control pills? http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2013/11/18/245959355/using-birth-control-pills-may-increase-womens-glaucoma-risk...
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Community
...http://www.popsugar.com/moms/Husband-Films-Wife-Giving-Birth-While-Driving-37930002 Seriously, whose unmedicated birth looks this calm and serene…..and in a car?! Crazy!...
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Pregnancy
With about 30 percent of women in the United States delivering by C-section, it is important to be able to separate fact from fiction when it comes to this method of delivery. Whether you know ahead of time that you are having a planned C-section...
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Pregnancy
When a woman thinks of her perfect birth experience, it may include scenarios like going into labor spontaneously, having a great connection with your doctor or midwife, delivering a plump, term baby vaginally, and going home feeling ready to get...
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Baby
Chlamydia is the most common sexually transmitted disease—and in many cases, women who have chlamydia don’t suffer from any symptoms. If symptoms are present, they can include vaginal discharge, bleeding after sex, or itching and burning during...
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Blog
After your baby is born, how long will it take to recover and what can you do for pain? What about postpartum depression? Exercise? If you have questions about your postpartum recovery, we have answers! Thanks to Music Together, which supported...
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Pregnancy
The Big Day is coming, and it’s easy to feel overwhelmed by everything you want to take care of before your baby is born. There are a few decisions that honestly can wait until you meet your little one: it’s not crucial you’ve got the colors of...
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Pregnancy
As you’re nearing the final weeks, labor and delivery are no doubt looming larger in your mind. Anxiety over labor is common—even if you’ve taken every birth class you could sign up for, prepared an extensive birth plan, and already packed your...
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Pregnancy
While home births account for only about 0.6 percent of all births in the United States, they have gained increasing visibility in recent years, especially in the media. Women opt for home births for various reasons: they want the comfort of being...
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Community
http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/11/18/us-chemicals-cosmetics-idUSBRE9AH15620131118 And I say “may” because this study was not really designed to be able to make that statement 100%. In this study, women’s urine samples were...
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Blog
If you gave birth in a hospital 50 years ago, the chances that your obstetrician was a male were almost 100 percent. That has changed in recent years as more and more women have gone into the field of medicine. In fact, most recently 82 percent of...
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Blog
The results of the 2016 presidential election have led to many discussions on a wide range of topics, and one of them has been focused on healthcare. Specifically, will a Trump presidency mean an end to the Affordable Care Act (ACA), the federal...
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Parenting
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Pregnancy
After your baby is born, you will enter a period of intense change, the postpartum period. During this time, manage your own physical recovery to better care for your baby. If you had a vaginal birth, the area of your vagina and rectum will be...
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Pregnancy
Giving birth vaginally can result in vaginal tearing or lacerations for many women. This is part of the normal process of a baby passing through the birth canal and out the vagina. It tends to be more common in women giving birth for the first time...
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Pregnancy
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Parenting
If it sometimes seems like older children were born bossy, consider some of history’s most famous eldest children: Oprah Winfrey, Hillary Clinton, George W. Bush, and Winston Churchill. In fact, some of the stereotypes regarding first-born...
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Pregnancy
A preterm birth happens when a woman gives birth before 37 weeks of pregnancy. With this issue complicating about 12 percent of all pregnancies in the United States, many parents wonder how it could affect their future pregnancies. For the woman...
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Parenting
With so many birth control options out there for women to use, it can be hard to know which one might work best for you. However, we know that the category of long-acting reversible contraceptives (also known as LARCs) work the best in preventing...
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Parenting
What do Billy Crystal, Jim Carrey, Katie Couric, and Cameron Diaz all have in common? Obviously they’re all celebrities—but they’re also all the youngest children in their families. When it comes to family order, youngest children...
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Blog
There has been a lot of buzz going around the parenting world lately about the practice of delayed cord clamping, with expecting mothers asking questions like what it is, what are the benefits, and how it will affect my child down the road. Though...
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Blog
The content for this blog was provided by Music Together Worldwide in accordance with Bundoo’s Editorial Policy. As a new faculty member at Iowa State University in the ‘80s, Sister Lorna Zemke was an important influence for me. Sister taught at...
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Blog
Not too long ago, we ran an article on the dangers of water births, after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) identified two cases of Legionnaires disease in babies delivered through a water birth. The infection was linked to...
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Blog
The goal of most mothers is to deliver a happy, healthy baby on or close to her due date. For about two-thirds of women in the United States, this happens via a vaginal delivery. But for the 25 to 30 percent of moms who deliver by Cesarean section,...
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Baby
Parents are often devastated when they find out their newborn has a congenital birth defect. An uncommon cause of birth defects includes amniotic bands. Amniotic band sequence (ABS) involves a group of disorders that result in birth defects of the...
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Pregnancy
Mothers have many choices when it comes to creating a birth plan, and some of them are quite controversial among the medical community. Water births — also called immersion births — have long been viewed as problematic for a variety of reasons, but...
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Parenting
The ranks of middle children include some famous names: Martin Luther King Jr., David Letterman, Madonna, and Princess Diana, to name a few. This might come as a surprise if you’re used to thinking of middle children as permanently stuck between...
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Pregnancy
Postpartum thyroiditis is a condition that results in inflammation of the thyroid gland after giving birth. The condition first causes high thyroid levels, then results in hypothyroidism or low thyroid levels. Knowing the symptoms of postpartum...
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Pregnancy
The cervix is the narrow, lower part of the uterus that should remain closed (or close to it) until it’s time to give birth. However, it isn’t only the dilation — or how open the cervix is — that matters when it comes to worrying about giving birth...
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Blog
Lifetime has an all-new “unscripted” series, “Born in the Wild,” which documents couples’ decisions to forgo birth in a hospital and instead give birth in nature on their own terms without assistance. “In this new series, families take one step...
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Blog
On Jan. 6, a very special delivery happened at The Medical Center of Plano in Texas: a grandmother, who was acting as a gestational carrier (the more updated version of what we used to call a surrogate) for her very own daughter, delivered her...
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Pregnancy
Chances are if you are pregnant, someone has talked to you about back labor (whether you asked them to or not). They may have also mentioned that their baby was “facing the wrong way” or “sunny side up” in labor. What they are referring to is when...
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Pregnancy
When his wife gave birth to their son George in 2013, England’s Prince William ventured to a place most royal dads hadn’t gone before: the delivery room. For many decades, a dad’s place during delivery was in the waiting room. Today, however, it’s...
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Baby
Congenital heart defects are the most common types of birth defect, affecting nearly 40,000 infants in the US each year. These conditions—which form in the baby’s heart while it’s still developing in utero—range from mild to severe life-threatening...
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Pregnancy
You’ve just given birth to a beautiful baby. And you may be anxious to get your baby home and begin your life together. But the time you stay in the hospital after delivery is an important time for you to heal. The length of time you will be in the...
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Pregnancy
All women have some vaginal bleeding after giving birth. However, sometimes it can be hard to know what is considered normal and what might be too much. It is normal to bleed for up to 6 weeks after giving birth, and this is independent of whether...
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Pregnancy
At some point after your baby is born, your doctor or midwife will place two clamps on the umbilical cord. He or she (or your partner, if they want to) will then use scissors to cut between the clamps and separate your baby from the placenta. If...
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Pregnancy
By now, almost everyone has seen or heard of the MTV show 16 and Pregnant, which documents the pregnancies and deliveries of teen moms. The show demonstrates the reality of teen pregnancy and has actually been credited with some of the recent...
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Pregnancy
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Pregnancy
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Pregnancy
Congratulations! Week 27 is generally considered the beginning of the third trimester, otherwise known as the homestretch. Now is a great time to get serious about planning for the big day—and if you’ve started planning already (because of course...
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Pregnancy
A shoulder dystocia is a complication encountered at the time of vaginal delivery. This occurs when a baby’s head has delivered, but the shoulders are stuck in the birth canal and do not deliver using standard delivery technique. Complicating...
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Pregnancy
When it comes to how your baby is positioned in the birth canal, being head down is the best way to be. Other positions (known as “presentations” in the medical community) are known as malpresentations. Some malpresentations may make a vaginal...
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Pregnancy
This might not be a couple’s first thought immediately after having a baby, but here’s something to think about: it’s possible for some women to conceive again within three weeks of having a baby, even before their first postpartum menstruation....
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Pregnancy
In late 2014, a 36-year-old Swiss woman made medical history when she gave birth to a healthy baby after undergoing a womb transplant. For more than 15 years, researchers worldwide have been developing ways to artificially implant a womb or uterus....
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Pregnancy
A cervical exam tells your doctor or midwife a few things about your cervix. However, the number most pregnant women focus on is how open, or dilated, the cervix is. Sometimes it can be confusing to know exactly what this number really does (or...
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Pregnancy
Unfortunately there is no one thing that always happens to all pregnant women when they go into labor. In fact, what a woman experiences as her body prepares to give birth can vary greatly between different women and even different pregnancies. But...
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Baby
Some parents are concerned when they meet their newborn and see a defect in the front of their child’s ear. These are called ear tags or ear pits (preauricular pits). They are common birth defects. Both conditions are formed in utero, when the ears...
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Pregnancy
Experiencing a preterm birth for the first time can be a scary, stressful experience. Whether you delivered at 24 weeks or 34 weeks of pregnancy, bringing a baby into the world sooner than you were mentally prepared for can really make thinking...
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Pregnancy
While a vaginal delivery is often the goal for most mothers-to-be, there are a few scenarios where that just isn’t possible. Sometimes this only becomes obvious in labor, when a baby is not fitting through the birth canal or his heart rate shows...
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Baby
Hypoplastic left heart syndrome is a serious congenital heart defect that affects development of the left side of the heart. This rare condition affects the heart’s mitral valve, left ventricle, aortic valve, and aorta. The baby’s left ventricle,...
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Baby
Once they become familiar with it, most parents are interested in skin-to-skin contact with their babies shortly after birth—even if they don’t know exactly why it’s so good for them and their baby. But rest assured: there is real science behind...
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Pregnancy
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Pregnancy
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Pregnancy
With up to one-third of pregnant women delivering by Cesarean section in the United States, it’s important to know what to expect when it comes to your recovery after a Cesarean delivery. Being sent home with an incision on your belly can add to...
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Pregnancy
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Pregnancy
You’ve just spent nearly 40 weeks growing a human, carefully watching what you eat and how much you weigh. Now that you’ve given birth, you might be anxious to get the extra pounds off and, more importantly, focus on getting your body back in...
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Pregnancy
As your due date nears, you might be wondering how your body decides one day that it is time to give birth. What exactly kicks things off, and why do some women give birth on their due date while others seem to stay pregnant forever until they are...
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Pregnancy
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Pregnancy
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Pregnancy
After you’ve given birth to your baby, there are a lot of things you expect to lose (especially the baby weight!). What you might not expect to lose is your hair. However, an estimated 40-50 percent of women experience greater-than-normal amounts...
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Health
Achondroplasia is a rare genetic disorder affecting one out of every 26,000-40,000 babies. There are more than 250,000 people worldwide afflicted with this disease. If a baby has achondroplasia, it will usually be evident at birth. Many patients...
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Pregnancy
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Pregnancy
A doula is a type of specialist who has been trained to support a laboring woman before, during, and after her birth. The word doula derives from the Greek term “a woman who serves” and they do just that: they provide emotional and physical support...
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Health
During a typical conception, a sperm carrying either an X or Y chromosome fertilizes an egg, which already has an X chromosome. An XY pairing is a boy; an XX chromosome pairing is a girl. Abnormalities in the genes on these or other chromosomes can...
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Pregnancy
It’s no secret that giving birth can be a painful endeavor. But a growing number of women are opting against using pain meds and epidurals during labor and instead trying to find more natural methods of combating contractions. One such method is...
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Pregnancy
Most pregnant women have heard of preeclampsia as a complication of pregnancy whose hallmark is high blood pressure. And most women have also been told by their obstetricians and midwives that this disease becomes more common as a woman gets closer...
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Baby
Hypospadias is a common birth defect in boys that occurs when the urethra, or opening from which urine drains, is not located on the tip of the penis. Babies with hypospadias may have a urinary opening underneath the tip, along the shaft, or near...
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Parenting
If you are a parent of more than one child, at times it may seem like your older child does all the talking for your younger child. Parents may think this means a younger sibling’s language will be slower to develop, however, research tells us this...
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Baby
Congratulations! If you’re like most new parents, you’re in the middle of a whirlwind of new experiences and emotions right now, just days after the arrival of your new baby. It’s not uncommon for new parents to be simultaneously flooded with love...