Supportive care and childbirth have been connected for all of recorded history. The impact of supportive care on health outcomes, however, has only been investigated over the last few decades. Research provides powerful evidence of improved outcomes for mothers and babies when mothers are supported in labor. These outcomes include, but are not limited to, lower rates of analgesia and anesthesia...

BACKGROUND Proper antenatal care and good delivery practice helps to prevent the complications of childbirth and ensures a wholesome maternal and child health in the future. Almost half of the births in the developing countries take place without a skilled birth attendant. OBJECTIVES To assess the antenatal care (ANC) and delivery practices in the Village Development Committees (VDC) of Ilam ...

OBJECTIVE Fear of childbirth (FOC) or what is historically referred to as tokophobia (a phobic state where a woman avoids childbirth despite desperately wanting a baby), is known to complicate the delivery process. In this study, the relationship of Anxiety Sensitivity (AS) to FOC was examined given that AS is a risk factor for other fears. Specifically, the contribution of three AS dimensions ...

This article describes three paradigms of health care that heavily influence contemporary childbirth, most particularly in the west, but increasingly around the world: the technocratic, humanistic, and holistic models of medicine. These models differ fundamentally in their definitions of the body and its relationship to the mind, and thus in the health care approaches they charter. The technocr...

BACKGROUND Persistence of postpartum depression (PPD) carries potential adverse implications for the emerging mother-child relationship and for child development. METHODS This study was designed to investigate factors related to the onset and persistence of PPD; in particular, we examined the cumulative effect of a range of psychosocial risk factors in predicting chronic PPD symptoms. One hun...

Why do modern humans have larger brains than earlier people such as Homo erectus? As large brains cause problems in childbirth, infancy and locomotion, the advantage they offer must be substantial. This advantage might be associated with increased IQ, but there is a problem: evidence from MRI volumetric surveys, microcephaly and hemispherectomy shows that there exist individuals with psychometr...

From the Department of Anesthesiology, Perioperative and Pain Medicine (H.K.E., W.R.C.) and the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology (E.S.L.), Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School, Boston; and the Department of Anesthesiology and Intensive Care Medicine, Eberhard-Karls University, Tübingen, Germany (H.K.E.). Address reprint requests to Dr. Camann at the Department of Anest...

OBJECTIVE Poor medical record documentation remains a pervasive problem in hospital delivery rooms, hampering efforts aimed at improving the quality of maternal and neonatal care in resource-limited settings. We evaluated the feasibility and completeness of labor room documentation within a quasi-experimental study aimed at improving emergency preparedness for obstetric and neonatal emergencies...

BACKGROUND Inadequate water and sanitation during childbirth are likely to lead to poor maternal and newborn outcomes. This paper uses existing data sources to assess the water and sanitation (WATSAN) environment surrounding births in Tanzania in order to interrogate whether such estimates could be useful for guiding research, policy and monitoring initiatives. METHODS We used the most recent...

Aim: The study was carried out to test the effect of childbirth counseling on pregnant women requested for cesarean delivery. Method: One arm intervention study was carried out at two private clinics at Mansoura, Egypt, Using the clinics database. A purposive sample of 40 women was identified based on who had planned for on demand primary Caesarean Section between October 2014 and Jan 2015. Res...