For most new mothers, the first 48-hours of their newborn baby’s life is purely magical.
They think of little else than their new love bubble, and perhaps how much they’re looking forward to a decent night’s sleep.
But for Elizabeth Waggett, then 36, it was also the time she was told she was facing a lifetime of paralysis, following a catastrophic childbirth injury that she was unaware had even happened.
In August 2021, she gave birth to her daughter Darcey,
Pregnant women are everywhere, but in a way it’s hard to see them. The pregnant woman’s body is shrouded in a veil of symbolism, made an object of our anxieties and hopes in a way that’s distinct and intense even when compared with the various other ways we objectify woman. When people look at a pregnant person, they often don’t see a human being so much as a series of abstractions related to pregnancy: “maternity,” “nature,” and “creation” in all … Read more
It’s a question on every new parent’s exhausted mind: Why are babies born so helpless? In 1960, an American anthropologist laid out an influential explanation rooted in human evolution.
As our early ancestors began walking upright, Sherwood Washburn argued in 1960, they evolved a narrower pelvis to make walking long distances more efficient. At the same time, those hominins were evolving larger brains. And babies with big heads could get stuck in a tight birth canal during delivery, threatening the
In the United States, the richest mothers and their newborns are the most likely to survive the year after childbirth — except when the family is Black, according to a groundbreaking new study of two million California births. The richest Black mothers and their babies are twice as likely to die as the richest white mothers and their babies.
Research has
