Once a country’s fertility rate falls consistently below replacement, its age profile begins to shift. Chinese women have been subjected to China’s brutal one-child policy for more than 30 years. Women who try to have more children have been subjected to fines and forced abortions. Their houses have been razed and their husbands fired from [...]

Recreation of Neanderthal child. Professor George Church of Harvard Medical School is looking for an “adventurous” woman to give birth to a baby Neanderthal.  It sounds like the plot of another Jurassic Park sequel, but the request is actually part of Professor Church’s real-life plan to bring our long-extinct relative back to life.    

Every hour a baby is born in the United States with symptoms of withdrawal from opiates. During the last decade the U.S. has seen a sharp increase in the number of pregnant women addicted to opiate drugs and the number of babies born experiencing withdrawal symptoms as the fastest growing abuse of prescription drugs has [...]

What if oil company executives were only allowed to drink fracked water? Toxic fracking chemicals that leached into the ground making you sick? Why that’s bad press for the oil industry! That’s why they came up with this ingenious (in an evil way) to deal with the problem: “gag” doctors from telling their patients what [...]

Motherhood without marriage has settled deeply into middle America. Birth to unmarried women used to be called illegitimacy, now it is the new normal.  The share of children born to unmarried women has crossed a threshold after steadily rising for five decades: more than half of births to American women under 30 occur outside marriage.

Home births are still rare in the United States but it is a growing trend. Jessica Wilcox thinks her in-laws still view her ideas about childbirth as kind of out there, but it’s hard to argue with success: In the last five years or so, Wilcox has given birth to two boys and two girls [...]

Sex-selective feticide is warping the balance between male and female births and consequently skewing the sex ratios for the rising generation. The world over the past three decades has come to witness an ominous and entirely new form of gender discrimination: sex-selective feticide.  The feticide is implemented through the practice of surgical abortion with the [...]

Twin birth rate rose 76 percent from 1980 through 2009. Over the past three decades, the number of twins born to American women has risen dramatically, a new government study shows.

It‘s just not fair: Middle children are in a bad spot Throughout your childhood, not only did your big brother steal your Halloween candy, but as an adult he probably makes more money than you, too, say recently released survey findings.

f What can a fetus sense when? As a fetus grows, it’s constantly getting messages from its mother. It’s not just hearing her heartbeat and whatever music she might play to her belly; it also gets chemical signals through the placenta. A new study, which will be published in Psychological Science, a journal of the [...]