Maternal experience before and during pregnancy is known to play a key role in offspring development. However, the influence of social cues about disease in the maternal environment has not been explored. We indirectly exposed pregnant mice to infected neighbours by housing them next to non-contagious conspecifics infected with Babesia microti. We examined the effect of this indirect immunologi...

Fetal dystocia is the result of an unfortunate relationship between fetal anatomy and maternal pelvic capacity. Most commonly, arrest of labor progress occurs at a point at which the problem is solved without significant risk to maternal-fetal welfare by abdominal delivery. This article has, in part, focused upon some rare exceptions and on how to anticipate and deal with them as well as possible.

The history of the welfare state has, in the past twenty or so years, moved away from a simple teleological account of a shift from the cruelty of the new Poor Law to the new Jerusalem of Beveridge. There is now a much more sophisticated understanding of the risk pools of various forms of welfare provision, of the interplay of interests in the shaping of policy, of the impact of Idealism and pa...

A difficulty frequently experienced by the public health officials and workers in charge of maternity relief and child-welfare organizations in this country is in getting reasonably correct statistics of maternal mortality. The -extraordinary variations in the maternal death-rates recorded in the different provinces and in cities in the same province are so incredible that little value can be a...

Microsystem risk and protective factors associated with early sexual intercourse among low-income adolescents were assessed using bioecological theory and a risk and resiliency framework. Waves 1 and 2 of Welfare, Children and Families: A Three-City Study were used (N=984, 10-14 years). Findings showed age, gender, race, two-parent households, separated households, households where the mother f...

This paper presents the results of a randomized study of a home visiting program implemented in Germany for low-income, first-time mothers. A major goal of the program is to improve the participants’ economic self-sufficiency and family planning. I use administrative data from the German social security system and detailed telephone surveys to examine the effects of the intervention on maternal...

We examine the extent to which children are exposed to the welfare system through their mother’s receipt of benefits and its impact on several developmental outcomes. Using data from the matched mother-child file from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY), we find that children’s welfare exposure is substantial. By age 10 over one-third of all children will have lived in a welfare ho...

We evaluate the effect of childcare vs. maternal time inputs on child cognitive achievement using the single mothers from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY79). To deal with non-random selection of children into childcare, we exploit the (plausibly) exogenous variation in welfare policy rules facing single mothers. In particular, the 1996 Welfare Reform, and earlier State level pol...