Maternal Health

Kangaroo mother care involves prolonged continuous skin-to-skin contact between a mother or her surrogate and her preterm or low birth weight infant. For stable preterm infants, this low-cost, high-impact intervention has been shown to offer better…

Interested in a position in reproductive, maternal, newborn, child or adolescent health? Every month, the Maternal Health Task Force rounds up job and internship postings from around the globe. This month, we are featuring positions with Save the…

A critical absence from the recent “cesarean section debate” has been the long-term health impact of excessively high c-section rates—including increased risk of miscarriage, unexplained stillbirth, placenta previa, placenta accreta and abruption in…

The Maternal Health Task Force recently had the pleasure of interviewing Saraswathi Vedam, Principal Investigator, Birth Place Lab, and Associate Professor, Division of Midwifery, Faculty of Medicine, University of British Columbia about her innovative…

There is a dearth of mental health screening tools validated for use in low-resource settings among pregnant women, specifically in Africa. To address this research gap, a study recently published in PLOS ONE by Heyningen et al. examined the reliability…

The term perinatal mental health is generally used to refer to the mental health of women during pregnancy and in the postpartum period, but paternal perinatal mental health may also have a large impact on the health and wellbeing of mothers and…

While the number of deaths from malaria has declined around the world, malaria in pregnancy (MiP) continues to pose substantial health risks to pregnant women and newborns. MiP is a large contributor of global maternal deaths, and in sub-Saharan Africa,…

The BetterBirth Program team at Ariadne Labs and partners recently led one of the world’s largest maternal newborn health trials in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh. Using bedside peer-coaching of birth attendants and facility managers, along with the…

While advocacy efforts around home birth—typically in high-income countries—tend to center on women’s rights to choose where they will have their babies, it is important to remember that home birth is not always a choice. Particularly in low-resource…

Despite progress, Tanzania's under-five mortality rate continues to be high—largely driven by deaths during the first week of birth. A pilot study recently assessed the benefits of a low-cost, evidence-based preventive care bundle on preterm infant…