Birth Settings in America

Birth Settings in America
Author: National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine
Publisher: National Academies Press
Total Pages: 369
Release: 2020-05-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0309669820

The delivery of high quality and equitable care for both mothers and newborns is complex and requires efforts across many sectors. The United States spends more on childbirth than any other country in the world, yet outcomes are worse than other high-resource countries, and even worse for Black and Native American women. There are a variety of factors that influence childbirth, including social determinants such as income, educational levels, access to care, financing, transportation, structural racism and geographic variability in birth settings. It is important to reevaluate the United States' approach to maternal and newborn care through the lens of these factors across multiple disciplines. Birth Settings in America: Outcomes, Quality, Access, and Choice reviews and evaluates maternal and newborn care in the United States, the epidemiology of social and clinical risks in pregnancy and childbirth, birth settings research, and access to and choice of birth settings.

Birth Figures

Birth Figures
Author: Rebecca Whiteley
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 309
Release: 2023-03-13
Genre: Art
ISBN: 0226823121

Introduction: picturing pregnancy -- Part I: Early printed birth figures (1540-1672). Using images in midwifery practice; Pluralistic images and the early modern body -- Part II: Birth figures as agents of change (1672-1751). Visual experiments; Visualizing touch and defining a professional persona -- Part III: The birth figure persists (1751-1774). Challenging the Hunterian hegemony -- Conclusion.

Child Data Citizen

Child Data Citizen
Author: Veronica Barassi
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 233
Release: 2020-12-22
Genre: Computers
ISBN: 0262044714

An examination of the datafication of family life--in particular, the construction of our children into data subjects. Our families are being turned into data, as the digital traces we leave are shared, sold, and commodified. Children are datafied even before birth, with pregnancy apps and social media postings, and then tracked through babyhood with learning apps, smart home devices, and medical records. If we want to understand the emergence of the datafied citizen, Veronica Barassi argues, we should look at the first generation of datafied natives: our children. In Child Data Citizen, she examines the construction of children into data subjects, describing how their personal information is collected, archived, sold, and aggregated into unique profiles that can follow them across a lifetime.

Preterm Birth

Preterm Birth
Author: Institute of Medicine
Publisher: National Academies Press
Total Pages: 791
Release: 2007-05-23
Genre: Medical
ISBN: 030910159X

The increasing prevalence of preterm birth in the United States is a complex public health problem that requires multifaceted solutions. Preterm birth is a cluster of problems with a set of overlapping factors of influence. Its causes may include individual-level behavioral and psychosocial factors, sociodemographic and neighborhood characteristics, environmental exposure, medical conditions, infertility treatments, and biological factors. Many of these factors co-occur, particularly in those who are socioeconomically disadvantaged or who are members of racial and ethnic minority groups. While advances in perinatal and neonatal care have improved survival for preterm infants, those infants who do survive have a greater risk than infants born at term for developmental disabilities, health problems, and poor growth. The birth of a preterm infant can also bring considerable emotional and economic costs to families and have implications for public-sector services, such as health insurance, educational, and other social support systems. Preterm Birth assesses the problem with respect to both its causes and outcomes. This book addresses the need for research involving clinical, basic, behavioral, and social science disciplines. By defining and addressing the health and economic consequences of premature birth, this book will be of particular interest to health care professionals, public health officials, policy makers, professional associations and clinical, basic, behavioral, and social science researchers.

The Role of Environmental Hazards in Premature Birth

The Role of Environmental Hazards in Premature Birth
Author: Institute of Medicine
Publisher: National Academies Press
Total Pages: 146
Release: 2003-11-17
Genre: Science
ISBN: 0309166810

Each year in the United States approximately 440,000 babies are born premature. These infants are at greater risk of death, and are more likely to suffer lifelong medical complications than full-term infants. Clinicians and researchers have made vast improvements in treating preterm birth; however, little success has been attained in understanding and preventing preterm birth. Understanding the complexity of interactions underlying preterm birth will be needed if further gains in outcomes are expected. The Institute of Medicine's Roundtable on Environmental Health Sciences, Research, and Medicine sponsored a workshop to understand the biological mechanism of normal labor and delivery, and how environmental influences, as broadly defined, can interact with the processes of normal pregnancy to result in preterm birth. This report is a summary of the main themes presented by the speakers and participants.

Fertility and Public Policy

Fertility and Public Policy
Author: Noriyuki Takayama
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 296
Release: 2010-12-17
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0262295121

Experts discuss the appropriateness and effectiveness using public policy to influence fertility decisions. In 2050, world population growth is predicted to come almost to a halt. Shortly thereafter it may well start to shrink. A major reason behind this shift is the fertility decline that has taken place in many developed countries. In this book, experts discuss the appropriateness and effectiveness of using public policy to influence fertility decisions. Contributors discuss the general feasibility of public interventions in the area of fertility, analyze fertility patterns and policy design in such countries as Japan, South Korea, China, Sweden, and France, and offer theoretical analyses of parental fertility choices that provide an overview of a broad array of child-related policy instruments in a number of OECD and EU countries. The chapters show that it is difficult to gauge the effectiveness of such policy interventions as child-care subsidies, support for women's labor-force participation, and tax incentives. Data are often incomplete, causal relations unproved, and the role of social norms and culture difficult to account for. Investigating reasons for the decline in fertility more closely will require further study. This volume offers the latest work on this increasingly important subject.

The Best Intentions

The Best Intentions
Author: Committee on Unintended Pregnancy
Publisher: National Academies Press
Total Pages: 393
Release: 1995-06-16
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0309556376

Experts estimate that nearly 60 percent of all U.S. pregnancies--and 81 percent of pregnancies among adolescents--are unintended. Yet the topic of preventing these unintended pregnancies has long been treated gingerly because of personal sensitivities and public controversies, especially the angry debate over abortion. Additionally, child welfare advocates long have overlooked the connection between pregnancy planning and the improved well-being of families and communities that results when children are wanted. Now, current issues--health care and welfare reform, and the new international focus on population--are drawing attention to the consequences of unintended pregnancy. In this climate The Best Intentions offers a timely exploration of family planning issues from a distinguished panel of experts. This committee sheds much-needed light on the questions and controversies surrounding unintended pregnancy. The book offers specific recommendations to put the United States on par with other developed nations in terms of contraceptive attitudes and policies, and it considers the effectiveness of over 20 pregnancy prevention programs. The Best Intentions explores problematic definitions--"unintended" versus "unwanted" versus "mistimed"--and presents data on pregnancy rates and trends. The book also summarizes the health and social consequences of unintended pregnancies, for both men and women, and for the children they bear. Why does unintended pregnancy occur? In discussions of "reasons behind the rates," the book examines Americans' ambivalence about sexuality and the many other social, cultural, religious, and economic factors that affect our approach to contraception. The committee explores the complicated web of peer pressure, life aspirations, and notions of romance that shape an individual's decisions about sex, contraception, and pregnancy. And the book looks at such practical issues as the attitudes of doctors toward birth control and the place of contraception in both health insurance and "managed care." The Best Intentions offers frank discussion, synthesis of data, and policy recommendations on one of today's most sensitive social topics. This book will be important to policymakers, health and social service personnel, foundation executives, opinion leaders, researchers, and concerned individuals. May

The Birth Dearth

The Birth Dearth
Author: Ben J. Wattenberg
Publisher:
Total Pages: 210
Release: 1989
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9780886875671

Birth Strike

Birth Strike
Author: Jenny Brown
Publisher: PM Press
Total Pages: 313
Release: 2019-04-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1629636533

When House Speaker Paul Ryan urged U.S. women to have more children, and Ross Douthat requested “More babies, please,” in a New York Times column, they openly expressed what policymakers have been discussing for decades with greater discretion. Using technical language like “age structure,” “dependency ratio,” and “entitlement crisis,” establishment think tanks are raising the alarm: if U.S. women don’t get busy having more children, we’ll face an aging workforce, slack consumer demand, and a stagnant economy. Feminists generally believe that a prudish religious bloc is responsible for the protracted fight over reproductive freedom in the U.S. and that politicians only attack abortion and birth control to appeal to those “values voters.” But hidden behind this conventional explanation is a dramatic fight over women’s reproductive labor. On one side, elite policymakers want an expanding workforce reared with a minimum of employer spending and a maximum of unpaid women’s work. On the other side, women are refusing to produce children at levels desired by economic planners. By some measures our birth rate is the lowest it has ever been. With little access to childcare, family leave, health care, and with insufficient male participation, U.S. women are conducting a spontaneous birth strike. In other countries, panic over low birth rates has led governments to underwrite childbearing and childrearing with generous universal programs, but in the U.S., women have not yet realized the potential of our bargaining position. When we do, it will lead to new strategies for winning full access to abortion and birth control, and for improving the difficult working conditions U.S. parents now face when raising children.

Children of Immigrants

Children of Immigrants
Author: National Research Council
Publisher: National Academies Press
Total Pages: 673
Release: 1999-11-12
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0309065453

Immigrant children and youth are the fastest-growing segment of the U.S. population, and so their prospects bear heavily on the well-being of the country. Children of Immigrants represents some of the very best and most extensive research efforts to date on the circumstances, health, and development of children in immigrant families and the delivery of health and social services to these children and their families. This book presents new, detailed analyses of more than a dozen existing datasets that constitute a large share of the national system for monitoring the health and well-being of the U.S. population. Prior to these new analyses, few of these datasets had been used to assess the circumstances of children in immigrant families. The analyses enormously expand the available knowledge about the physical and mental health status and risk behaviors, educational experiences and outcomes, and socioeconomic and demographic circumstances of first- and second-generation immigrant children, compared with children with U.S.-born parents.