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HEALTH & ILLNESS–
BIRTH CONTROL: WOMEN ON THE PILL
It’s ten o’clock at night on a college campus. Why are a bunch of cell phone alarms going off?
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Pregnancy & Birth / Articles
HEALTH & ILLNESS–
RELATIVE RISK OF BIRTH CONTROL PILLS
In 1995, women of the United Kingdom went on a massive birth control strike. The British Committee on Safety of Medicines announced that third-generation progestogen pills carried twice the risk of blood clots as did second-generation pills, and 41% of women stopped taking their oral contraceptives immediately.
HEALTH & ILLNESS–
MISCARRIAGE: AS COMMON AS ATTENDING A BALL GAME
A pregnancy that suddenly ends through miscarriage is one of the most heart-wrenching events a woman can go through. As the writer N. West Moss wrote in the New York Times, “It feels as though having three miscarriages in a year means I did something wrong, when the reality is that most miscarriages take place for chromosomal reasons out of our control.” Not only are miscarriages—defined as loss of pregnancy before the fetus reaches 20 weeks old—out of human control, they are becoming more and more detectable.
HEALTH & ILLNESS–
APGAR: A BABY’S FIRST TEST
By the time we reach adulthood, our lives have been full of tests. We’ve been graded on our performance in everything from spelling to calculus. In fact, most people receive their first test as soon as they are born.
HEALTH & ILLNESS–
BEHIND THE NUMBERS: GENDER-STREAKING: THE ODDS OF HAVING SAME-SEX KIDS IN A ROW
The parents of large families have sons and daughters in every combination and birth order. But some couples seem to go on a gender-streak. After Joe and Rose Kennedy had two sons, Joe Jr. and the future president, John F. Kennedy, they went on a streak of four girls in a row before alternating boy-girl-boy for the three youngest. Joe and Katherine Jackson, the parents of the Jackson 5, started with four boys, then had their first girl, LaToya, and then had another four boys before Janet.
HEALTH & ILLNESS–
PREGNANCY OVER 40 IS COMMON—AND UNLIKELY
Medical advances over recent decades have redrawn the biological boundary limiting a woman’s ability to conceive and bear children. These advances have come with controversy, including worry about the increased health risks posed by advanced maternal age, and the concern that people who become parents in their sixties and even beyond may not live to raise their children.
HEALTH & ILLNESS–
AND BABY MAKES TWO… OR FOUR: A LOOK AT TWINS AND MULTIPLE BIRTHS
Twins, triplets, quadruplets, and even bigger broods hold seemingly endless fascination. Identical siblings dressed in identical outfits and stories of twins separated at birth invite questions about nature, nurture, and human individuality. Reality shows like Jon and Kate Plus 8 rake in the ratings.
HEALTH & ILLNESS–
C-SECTIONS: THE ULTIMATE IN PLANNED PARENTHOOD
Going into labor is a staple of movies and television. Think Charlotte in the “Sex and the City” movie. A pregnant woman is going about her life—enjoying a meal in a fancy restaurant, or taking a Yoga for Mommies class, or painting the nursery—when suddenly she clutches her belly, looks down at her feet and announces, “My water just broke.”
HEALTH & ILLNESS–
AGAINST THE ODDS: BORN AT 1 POUND AND 12 INCHES, THIS BABY HAD 9 LIVES
Researchers at Book of Odds immerse themselves in probabilities. When 22-year-old Benjamin Kriss joined us in February, 2008, he began by compiling cancer odds. He then moved on to strokes, heart attacks, and kidney and liver failure. In the course of the past year and a half, he has sat in on countless presentations from other researchers, including ones on the chances of dying from an accidental fall, in a car crash, or in an airplane disaster. For some people, immersing themselves in scary probabilities leads to obsessive worry, like the hypochondria that often afflicts first-year medical students. Not Benny. “From the moment I was born, I was hit with the worst life could throw at me,” he declares. “I figure I have already survived.”
HEALTH & ILLNESS–
EARLY TO RISE: PREMATURE BIRTH RATES
Premature births are becoming more common around the globe, a phenomenon that puzzles health experts. In 1990, 1 in 9.43 births in the US occurred prematurely, but by 2007, 1 in 7.87 births was premature. The March of Dimes estimates that rates of prematurity have risen 35 percent since 1981.
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