Identical twins who share one placenta sometimes also share blood vessels inside it, and in a rare condition called twin anemia–polycythemia sequence a few of those vessels let red blood cells drift slowly from one twin to the other over many weeks. One baby ends up short of red cells and the other…

The umbilical cord usually joins the placenta somewhere near its middle, but in about one pregnancy in a hundred it attaches to the surrounding membranes instead, leaving a stretch of blood vessels unprotected. Four studies published between September 2025 and June 2026 examined how much this…

When identical twins share a single placenta, one baby sometimes grows far more slowly than the other. Four studies published during 2025 examined how well doctors can predict what will happen, what becomes of the twin who grows normally, and whether the procedure that might help can ever be…

Identical twins who share a placenta can also end up sharing their blood supply, and when that sharing goes wrong one baby is starved while the other is overloaded. Laser surgery inside the womb can separate the two circulations and give both babies a chance. Four studies published in 2025 and 2026…

A large study from Denmark followed more than 750,000 pregnancies and asked whether women who were taking a GLP-1 weight-loss or diabetes injection around the time they conceived were more likely to give birth early. The answer turned out to depend on why the medicine had been prescribed. Women who…

Surgery to close a baby's spina bifida before birth is no longer a single operation. There are now four ways to do it, and each protects something different — the mother's womb, the length of the pregnancy, or the child's chance of walking and of avoiding a brain shunt. No approach came out ahead…

Hydrops fetalis means that fluid has built up in at least two places inside a baby before birth — around the lungs, around the heart, in the abdomen, or under the skin. It is not one disease but a warning sign that can come from many different underlying causes, some very serious and a few quite…

A hospital in Okinawa, Japan looked back at 252 babies born weighing under 1,000 grams and studied a surgical technique in which the baby is lifted out at caesarean still inside its unbroken bag of waters. Severe bleeding in the brain occurred in 4.8% of babies delivered that way, compared with…

When a baby is about to be born far too early, doctors give the mother a steroid injection to help the baby's lungs and other organs get ready for life outside the womb. A large US study of 1,806 extremely premature babies found that even a single dose given just a few hours before birth was linked…

When a baby is about to be born much too early, doctors can give the mother an intravenous drip of magnesium sulfate — a form of the same mineral found in many foods — in the hours before delivery. A 2024 review that pooled the results of seven clinical trials, involving more than 8,000 mothers and…

Most people imagine premature birth as happening very early — at 24 or 28 weeks. But the most common type of premature birth is "late preterm" — at 34 to 36 weeks of pregnancy. Late preterm babies represent about 70% of all premature births globally [1], and with roughly 14.9 million premature…