Child custody, colonization, and the choices mother make

Jackie Thomas was $29,134 in debt and in trouble with state regulators. She hadn’t slept in days. If a judge ruled against her, she’d fail the mothers who could only keep their jobs thanks to the 24-hour child care she offered.

Baby Olivia weighed 1 pound, 10 ounces. Her doctors faced a stressful paradox: giving her the healing power of a parent’s touch, while keeping the virus out.

On modern motherhood and the birth narrative.

At work and at home, pregnancy alters the COVID experience.

America’s fetishization of reproductive risk is driving mothers mad.

A secret hope of mine, which I now find hilarious: I imagined that once I had a child, I would become a faster writer. Faster, and also better. It’s hard for me to reconstruct the optimistic logic that led me to this hypothesis. I think I honestly believed that if I did not have the option to write badly, I would simply evolve, like that Lamarckian giraffe, into a more efficient creature.

For years, Mormon Mommy blogger Natalie Lovin curated a picture-perfect life. Then she left the church—and her husband.

On becoming a mom.

On motherhood, writing, and the death of a friend.

On losing your mom.

After two months in the hospital, a mother finally got to take her premature baby home. Then she spent five years trying to convince him to eat.

Each year, about 50,000 women are severely injured giving birth. Half of these injuries could be reduced or eliminated with better care.

Why does prenatal care ignore the topic altogether?

On the cusp of delivery, a mother-to-be recounts the anxiety-laden path to parenthood.

In the midst of a national crisis, mothers addicted to drugs struggle to get off them — for their babies’ sake, and their own.

How a perfect vision of mother hood hurts moms.

A young mother and child, secluded in an apartment, face dangerous outside forces.

Melissa Cook is carrying triplets for a man she has never met, conceived with an egg that isn't hers. He only wants two of them, but won't let her keep the third. So she is suing, in the hopes that the court will arrive at a new meaning of parenthood.

Mother's Day triggers a wealth of memories and characters, past and present.

On the stories we tell ourselves about happiness and the indecent questions we ask women who decided not to become moms.

An Alabama woman took the equivalent of one Valium during her pregnancy. A few weeks after she gave birth, she became one of more than 1,800 new and expecting mothers arrested under the state’s chemical endangerment law.

On the magic of mother’s milk, which changes daily to meet the baby’s needs and can even start fighting an infection before anyone knows the kid is sick.

The stories of four women whose children joined the Islamic State.