Tag: babies

Giving birth in the last year has meant a suffocatingly cloistered, rather than a communal, experience.

Five months into her first pregnancy, one writer pursues a research project about the history of home economics, as she struggles with her own concerns about motherhood.

Here’s a reading list to celebrate World Breast Pumping Day on January 27.

If new parents say they don’t have intrusive thoughts about harm befalling their babies, “they’re lying.”

It’s a field as small as the people it operates on, and for many parents, it’s the only hope their children have.

When you don’t need to worry about the big things, you can start obsessing over the small ones.

“Brayden” and “Nevaeh” have got nothing on their 17th-century predecessors, “Waitstill” and “Supply.”

A toddler teaches her grandfather about the deep emotional structure of babies and adults, the perfect yoga pose for a complete meltdown, and the imperative to boogie.

Violet was born at 25 weeks and five days—more than three months ahead of her due date. This is a story about becoming parents in the face of uncertainty.

‘My daughter doesn’t have a father, or, she has two fathers, since I don’t know which man her father is. One of her fathers says it’s like Schrödinger’s cat in there.’

In Bloomberg Businessweek, Claire Suddath reports that there are only two countries in the world that don’t have some type of legally protected, partially paid leave for working women who just had a baby: Papua New Guinea and the U.S. The result is another big gap between the haves and have-nots: The policies vary widely […]

Nathan Deuel | Friday Was the Bomb | May 2014 | 21 minutes (5,178 words)   For our latest Longreads Member Pick, we’re thrilled to share a full chapter from Friday Was the Bomb, the new book by Nathan Deuel about moving to the Middle East with his wife in 2008. Deuel has been featured […]

Beyond the tired binaries of midwife vs. doctor and home birth vs. hospital birth. 1. “How We Made Our Miracle.” (Melissa Harris-Perry, MSNBC, Feb. 2014) After political commentator Melissa Harris-Perry shared pictures of her newborn daughter on Valentine’s Day, she wrote about her past health problems, her history with childbirth, and making the decision to […]

Some commentators have questioned the implausibility of “million-dollar babies.” I have no expertise in health care costs, but I have a 3-inch thick folder of hospital bills that range from a few dollars and cents to the high six figures (before insurance adjustments). So even though it’s unlikely that AOL directly paid out those sums, […]

After a couple has trouble having a second child, they turn to genetic screening and in vitro fertilization: When I awoke, the embryologist relayed the excellent news: We had 20 eggs—five more than we thought possible. As soon as the April sunshine hit my face, I called my mom. Heath called his. For the first […]

A writer who’s expecting meets one of the pioneers of the home birth movement, and considers whether to have her baby at home or in a hospital: When I reached my due date, an ultrasound estimated that my baby weighed 9.4 pounds. I didn’t have gestational diabetes and had gained an average amount of weight, […]

But a scientific revolution that has taken place in the last decade or so illuminates a different way to address the dysfunctions associated with childhood hardship. This science suggests that many of these problems have roots earlier than is commonly understood—especially during the first two years of life. Researchers, including those of the Bucharest project, […]