At 49%, Indonesia’s rate of female circumcision is the third highest in the world—despite laws banning the practice. What keeps it going? In Indonesia, female genital mutilation is rooted as much in family tradition as in religion, according to new research from Gajah…
Compared to white women, American Indian and Alaska Natives are more than 2X as likely to die from pregnancy-related causes. And Native women in urban areas—where there’s better access to care—fare no better than those on rural reservations.
In a fresh push to end FGM by 2030, WHO launched a new tool today that calculates the cost of the practice, marking the International Day of Zero Tolerance for Female Genital Mutilation, UN News reports.
America’s tragic racial inequity in maternal mortality is baked into health systems and will take time, legislative lobbying, and structural change to uproot. In the meantime, birth workers are doubling down to support black birthing families. SELF profiled 8 of them,…
In a worrisome trend, mother-to-child transmission of HIV have been creeping back in a handful of countries over the last 18 months—jeopardizing prog
The toll of intimate partner violence on breastfeeding is rarely considered, much less researched.
When I was 3, India opened up its economy, bringing in companies from around the world. Everything changed. As a baby, I had cloth diapers. My younger brother wore disposable diapers.
At the only government hospital in Liberia’s Grand Bassa county, women in labor are dying because their families can’t afford to fuel hospital ambulances—and neither can the hospital. Amid the fuel and supply shortages, patients have been advised to seek care in the capital…
In her aptly titled piece, “This isn’t another horror story about black motherhood,” Helena Andrews-Dyer highlights efforts by millennial mothers of color to fight the disparities that make it so dangerous for black women to give birth. She describes the exhausting work…
In Africa and Asia, 2 million women and girls live with obstetric fistula that leaves them incontinent. The condition is “effectively a hole in the birth canal” resulting from lengthy, obstructed labor without key emergency care, Sarah Newey reports. In developed nations…
