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.

The evaluation of reproductive, maternal, newborn, and child health (RMNCH) by the Disease Control Priorities, Third Edition (DCP3) focuses on maternal conditions, childhood illness, and malnutrition. Specifically, the chapters address acute illness and undernutrition in children, principally under age 5. It also covers maternal mortality, morbidity, stillbirth, and influences to pregnancy and pre-pregnancy. Volume 3 focuses on developments since the publication of DCP2 and will also include the transition to older childhood, in particular, the overlap and commonality with the child development volume. The DCP3 evaluation of these conditions produced three key findings: 1. There is significant difficulty in measuring the burden of key conditions such as unintended pregnancy, unsafe abortion, nonsexually transmitted infections, infertility, and violence against women. 2. Investments in the continuum of care can have significant returns for improved and equitable access, health, poverty, and health systems. 3. There is a large difference in how RMNCH conditions affect different income groups; investments in RMNCH can lessen the disparity in terms of both health and financial risk.

Each year more than 4 million children are born with birth defects. This book highlights the unprecedented opportunity to improve the lives of children and families in developing countries by preventing some birth defects and reducing the consequences of others. A number of developing countries with more comprehensive health care systems are making significant progress in the prevention and care of birth defects. In many other developing countries, however, policymakers have limited knowledge of the negative impact of birth defects and are largely unaware of the affordable and effective interventions available to reduce the impact of certain conditions. Reducing Birth Defects: Meeting the Challenge in the Developing World includes descriptions of successful programs and presents a plan of action to address critical gaps in the understanding, prevention, and treatment of birth defects in developing countries. This study also recommends capacity building, priority research, and institutional and global efforts to reduce the incidence and impact of birth defects in developing countries.

Improving maternal health and reducing child mortality are among the eight UN Millennium Development Goals. This publication contains guidance on maternity protection in the workplace, focusing on measures that can be taken to establish a decent workplace and to identify workplace risks. The starting point is the Maternity Protection Convention (No. 183), adopted by the International Labour Conference in 2000 and its accompanying Recommendation (No. 191). The guide is intended for general use as a reference tool for employers, workers, trade union leaders, occupation health and safety advisors, labour inspectors and others involved in workplace health and maternity protection.

This guide provides a full range of updated, evidence-based norms and standards that will enable health care providers to give high quality care during pregnancy, delivery and in the postpartum period, considering the needs of the mother and her newborn baby. All recommendations are for skilled attendants working at the primary level of health care, either at the facility or in the community. They apply to all women attending antenatal care, in delivery, postpartum or post abortion care, or who come for emergency care, and to all newborns at birth and during the first week of life (or later) for routine and emergency care. This guide is a guide for clinical decision-making. It facilitates the collection; analysis, classification and use of relevant information by suggesting key questions, essential observations and/or examinations, and recommending appropriate research-based interventions. It promotes the early detection of complications and the initiation of early and appropriate treatment, including time referral, if necessary. Correct use of this guide should help reduce high maternal and perinatal mortality and morbidity rates prevalent in many parts of the developing world, thereby making pregnancy and childbirth safer.

The emphasis of the manual is on rapid assessment and decision making. The clinical action steps are based on clinical assessment with limited reliance on laboratory or other tests and most are possible in a variety of clinical settings.

“[S]heds light not only on the obstacles to making motherhood safer, but to improving the health of poor populations in general.”—Social Anthropology Since 1987, when the global community first recognized the high frequency of women in developing countries dying from pregnancy-related causes, little progress has been made to combat this problem. This study follows the global policies that have been implemented in Sololá, Guatemala in order to decrease high rates of maternal mortality among indigenous Mayan women. The author examines the diverse meanings and understandings of motherhood, pregnancy, birth and birth-related death among the biomedical personnel, village women, their families, and midwives. These incongruous perspectives, in conjunction with the implementation of such policies, threaten to disenfranchise clients from their own cultural understandings of self. The author investigates how these policies need to meld with the everyday lives of these women, and how the failure to do so will lead to a failure to decrease maternal deaths globally. From the Introduction: An unspoken effect of reducing maternal mortality to a medical problem is that life and death become the only outcomes by which pregnancy and birth are understood. The specter of death looms large and limits our full exploration of either our attempts to curb maternal mortality, or the phenomenon itself. Certainly women’s survival during childbirth is the ultimate measure of success of our efforts. Yet using pregnancy outcomes and biomedical attendance at birth as the primary feedback on global efforts to make pregnancy safer is misguided.