Drug- and alcohol-related death rates among pregnant and recently pregnant American women increased sharply between 2015 and 2019, faster than among women of childbearing age in general, new research shows. “We need to broaden our view and look beyond complications of childbirth and pregnancy to fully understand the threats to recently pregnant women’s lives,” says…

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U.S. state and city leaders issued mask-wearing and social distancing directives in 2020 to contain the spread of the coronavirus pandemic. Residents applied the directives differently in their daily lives—reflecting how unevenly these public health messages are understood and followed, new research shows. These findings are among results from new research supported by the Eunice Kennedy…

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Racism-related stress may help explain why Black women in the United States are over 50% more likely to deliver a premature baby than white women. Just over 14% of Black women have premature births compared with 9% of white women.1 These stark racial disparities have been documented for more than a century, reports Catherine Cubbin…

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As coronavirus cases rise in less densely populated states in the Midwest and West, the disease, combined with high levels of obesity in rural America, could pose major challenges for health care systems, suggests Mark Lee at the University of Minnesota. People of any age with obesity face a greatly increased risk of severe illness…

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“We live in a country where we have huge numbers of children exposed to parental incarceration. When we talk about the need to reform the criminal justice and mass incarceration systems, we also need to talk about the unintended victims of the current system,” says Christine Leibbrand of the University of Washington. “Incarceration exposes families…

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As Mother’s Day 2020 fast approaches, the coronavirus pandemic—coupled with ongoing demographic trends—is making family life even more complicated for Americans. Millions of families are at increased risk of falling into poverty due to pandemic-related job losses, and social distancing protocols are separating some children from their parents who live in a different household. American…

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