c-sections

Testing at home for HPV, Montana guts family planning program, Tennessee will reimburse vaginal and C-section births at the same rate, nineteen Senators sign letter supporting Planned Parenthood, and Dillard's department store is sponsoring a fashion show to benefit Heroic Media, who is raising money for more racist billboards.

According to a hospital watchdog group, too many pregnant women in the United States are induced early, unnecessarily endangering their own health and that of their newborns.

A $3.5 billion maternity care problem; another Catholic hospital gets to expand and limit its services to women; female domestic partners on their babies' birth certificates; and Wal-Mart's wage discrimination case.

In a less well-known but no less controversial effort to find "common ground" a Home Birth Consensus summit seeks to bridge a divide between those who support and those who oppose expanded access to homebirth.

A coalition of individuals and national organizations focused on promoting evidence-based maternity care sends a message to ACOG to remove yet another barrier to VBACs.

A study shows that expectant mothers in California may face more constrained choices in childbirth depending on whether they choose a non-profit or for-profit hospital.

Good news from the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) yesterday. The group issued updated guidelines on vaginal birth after cesareans (VBACs), hopefully paving the way for more women to choose vaginal birth, after a previous c-section.

Having a baby still after a miscarriage still feels so unreal to me that having the decision about whether to undergo a scheduled c-section or attempt a V-BAC is itself surprising.

In an article about the use of fetal heart rate monitors during labor, Alex Friedman wonders why this tool that seems to do "more harm than good" is being used during labor at all.

A day after Republicans decided to declare their own week of half-days at work and to stall as much as possible all Senate business, Senator Barbara Mikulski (D-MD) took to the floor of the Senate to reiterate some of the most important elements of health reform for women.

Follow Jodi Jacobson on Twitter, @jljacobson