Low-risk pregnant women urged to avoid hospital births
NHS guidance from National Institute for Health and Care Excellence suggests 45% of births ‘unsuitable’ for labour wards
Will a bad marriage ruin my health?
Luisa Dillner: An unhappy marriage could break your heart. Is it better to leave a difficult relationship that might make you ill – or to fix it?
Countdown to big birthdays: how it feels to be on the cusp
The big birthdays are meant to be the scariest, but new research shows that we take the year before them the hardest – having affairs or running marathons. Oliver Burkeman, 39, and others come clean about being on the cusp
Breastfeeding targets set up new mothers to fail. Let’s get real
Enough of the one-size-fits-all approach. What women need are individually tailored feeding plans developed before the birth that are actually achievable
Are links between breastfeeding and health confounded? Quite possibly
Suzi Gage: How robust is observational data assessing associations between breastfeeding and health? A 2008 study came up with a novel way to try and find out
We don’t know why a mum abandoned her newborn baby. But we do know that the system fails mothers
Amy Gray: As crimes go, abandoning a newborn in a drain is awful. Cases like this are exceedingly rare, but our society’s neglect of mothers makes them possible
An Aviary of Small Birds review – a beautiful, painful, pitch-perfect debut
The stillbirth of Karen McCarthy Woolf’s son is the powerful emotional core of this deft, unsentimental collection, writes Kate Kellaway
My fight to save my daughter’s skin
Sharmila and James Collins have four daughters – Sohana, the eldest, is 12 and has never known a day without pain. She has EB, a rare, agonising skin condition, and her mother has devoted herself to fundraising to boost research into a cure that will help all children born with it
Do men really need to feel the pain of childbirth to empathise with women?
Emma Beddington: The pursuit of empathy is all very well, but delivering electric shocks doesn’t necessarily help fathers understand what labour is like
I feel let down by my mum – again
My mother and my brother who sides with her have caused me great distress. How do I move on?