Suhad Abu Fiad gets a prenatal ultrasound at a clinic in the West Bank city of Nablus. During a routine sonogram, Suhad Abu Fiad immediately tears up at the sight of her unborn baby’s tiny feet and fingers. She’s hoping for a girl but, as she’s only four months pregnant, it’s still too soon to tell. [...]

First-borns around the world, it turns out, have higher IQ’s. According to a new study “those born earlier perform better in school” and, it’s because of the parents. Parents simply go easy on their later-born kids, according to data analyzed by economists V. Joseph Hotz and Juan Pantano, and as a result, first-born children tend [...]

India’s booming surrogacy industry sees thousands of infertile couples hire the wombs of local women to carry their embryos through to birth. British restaurateur Rekha Patel, dressed in a green surgical gown and cap, cradled her newborn daughter at the Akanksha clinic in northwestern India as her husband Daniel smiled warmly, peering in through a [...]

Surrogacy agencies in both countries say demand has risen rapidly in the last two years. Rich Chinese couples are hiring American women to serve as surrogates for their children, creating a small but growing business in $120,000 “designer” American babies for China’s elite.    

There were almost 4 million babies born to American women in 2012. According to statistics in a National Center for Health Statistics report released last week, fertility rates are leveling off for the first time since before the recession began as more American women are having babies in an improving economy.    

Reported high rates of childlessness fail to take into account fertility treatments, adoptions and the simple delay of childbirth. Recent reports of the rise of childlessness are premature. As with fertility dynamics generally, the phenomenon has many parts. The reports may prove true in the long term, or they may not—but it’s too soon to [...]

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 [...]