Pregnant women who are part of an Asian-white couple face an increased risk of gestational diabetes as compared with couples in which both partners are white, according to a new study from Lucile Packard Children's Hospital and the Stanford University School of Medicine.

Monitoring the health of children born to women who attempted suicide while pregnant can shed light on which medicines and what doses are particularly dangerous to developing fetuses, according to researchers from Hungary who publish their findings in a series of reports in a special issue of Toxicology and Industrial Health, published this week by SAGE.

Researchers studying a critical stage of pregnancy – implantation of the embryo in the uterus – have found a protein that is vital to the growth of new blood vessels that sustain the embryo. Without this protein, which is produced in higher quantities in the presence of estrogen, the embryo is unlikely to survive.

A new study by researchers at The University of Texas Medical School at Houston could help experts better decide whether to continue the current practice of retesting women during their second pregnancies for a common bacterial infection if they had tested positive for the infection previously.

One in every two pregnant Australian woman still consume alcohol during pregnancy, according to a study in the Australian and New Zealand Journal of Obstetrics and Gynaecology. The responsibility of providing accurate information about the harmful effects of alcohol and its lifelong effects on the child falls on obstetricians and other health professionals.

Pregnancy alone does not appear to be associated with an increased risk of the most prevalent mental disorders, according to a report in the July issue of Archives of General Psychiatry, one of the JAMA/Archives journals. However, post-partum women may have a higher risk of major depressive disorder.

Couples who need in-vitro fertilization in order to become pregnant can be reassured that this will not lead to developmental problems in early infancy, a Dutch researcher told the 24th annual conference of the European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology.

Research into the effect of age and the number of times women undergo assisted reproduction technology (ART) shows that for younger women, the overwhelming majority achieve a pregnancy within the first two attempts, whereas women over the age of 40 had a more consistent, but lower, pregnancy rate of about 20% throughout their first four attempts.

Although younger people are becoming more positive towards surrogate mothers, current day attitudes to surrogacy are still broadly negative, a scientist will tell the 24th annual conference of the European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology.

Pregnancy rates decrease and miscarriages increase when a father is over 35 years of age, a scientist will tell the 24th annual conference of the European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology.

A transgender man Thomas Beattie, who made headlines after announcing he was pregnant, has given birth to a baby girl at a hospital in Oregon,the U.S. the People magazine reported.

Pregnancy seems to confer some protection against bladder cancer in mice, scientists have found.