Birth Story

The Spanish movie star couple Penelope Cruz and Javier Bardem reportedly welcomed a baby boy, their first child, on Jan. 22 at Cedars Sinai Hospital in Los Angeles.

Bardem was nominated for an Academy Award on Tuesday for best actor for his role in Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu's new film, Biutiful.

He won a best supporting actor Oscar in 2007 for his role as a psychopath in No Country for Old Men. Cruz won a best supporting actress Oscar in 2008 for Vicky Cristina Barcelona.

Cruz, 36, and Bardem, 41, were married in July in the Bahamas. The couple, who met nearly 20 years ago on the set of Jamon Jamon, Cruz's first movie, reunited while making Vicky Cristina Barcelona for Woody Allen in 2007.

The Leapfrog Group, a 10-year-old hospital monitoring group, has found that doctors and hospitals are commonly scheduling women for elective deliveries before 39 weeks of gestation, even though studies have established a bright arrow that shows that babies are at risk of death or serious health problems if they are born before then.

A survey of 773 hospitals released this week shows that these institutions performed more than 57,000 inductions and Cesarean sections before 39 weeks just in the last year. The hospitals displayed a wide range of rates for early elective deliveries, from less than 5% to more than 40%.

"Leapfrog’s release of 2010 data is the first real evidence that the practice of scheduling newborn deliveries before 39 weeks without a medical reason is common and varied among hospitals even in the same state or community," the report stated.

The brain and lungs aren't fully developed until the very last weeks of pregnancy, said Alan R. Fleischman MD, senior vice president and medical director of the March of Dimes, a group that works to prevent birth defects, and is working with Leapfrog to cut the numbers of early births.

“Women need to protect themselves by refusing to schedule their deliveries before 39 weeks without a sound medical reason, and by knowing the facts about the hospitals they plan to deliver in,” said Leapfrog CEO Leah Binder.

Some hospitals, notably Hospital Corporation of America, have programs in place to encourage doctors to refrain from scheduling Cesarean sections and elective inductions for nonmedical reason, Leapfrog officials said.

The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists came out once again this week cautioning against home births.

Hospitals and birthing centers are the safest place for labor and delivery, the speciality organization of obstetricians stated in a committee opinion on Thursday.

A prior Cesarean delivery "is an absolute contraindication to planning a home birth due to the risks, including uterine rupture," the statement said. Twins, breech babies and pregnancies that have gone beond 42 weeks are not good candidates either — too risky for the babies, ACOG said.

"Home births don't always go well, and the risk is higher if they are attended by inadequately trained attendants or in poorly selected patients with serious high-risk medical conditions such as hypertension, breech presentation, or prior Cesarean deliveries," said Richard N. Waldman MD, ACOG's president.

This is the latest in a long line of statements the group has made cautioning against the less than 1 percent of  American births that take place at home.

Even so, ACOG does want women to know that if they decide to deliver their babies at home, they should get the "standard components of prenatal care, including Group B strep screening and treatment, genetic screening, and HIV screening."

And, they should work with a birth attendant who is part of "an integrated and regulated health system, have ready access to consultation, and have a plan for safe and quick transportation to a nearby hospital in the event of an emergency," the statement said.

Actress Kelly Preston, wife of actor John Travolta, talked with Natalie Morales on the Today show on Wednesday morning about the "silent birth" of her son Benjamin at a hospital in Ocala, Fla., on Nov. 23.

Benjamin weighed eight pounds three ounces. Both Preston, 48, and Travolta, 56, are Scientologists. Their religion espouses a birth free of conversation, as supposedly "any words spoken ...can have an aberrative effect on the mother and the child."

Preston and Travolta have a daughter, Ella Bleu. Their son Jett died in 2009 at the age of 16.

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Frederik, the crown prince of Denmark, and his wife, Crown Princess Mary, brought their newborn twins home from Rigshospitalet in Copenhagen today.

The boy and girl were born on Jan. 8. In the custom of Danish royalty, the babies will receive their names at their christening, which could be as long as three months from now.

“I’ve just been told that they were born on Elvis’s (Presley) birthday,” the prince said at a press conference just after the birth. “Then we’ll call one of them Elvis.”

The birth started spontaneously and lasted about five hours, said Princess Mary’s obstetrician, Dr. Morten Hedegaard. The birth team also included midwife Birgitte Hillerup, who said the princess, 38, had an epidural for pain. Frederik attended the birth.

The twins, along with older siblings Christian, 5, and Isabella, 3, are expected to visit their mother’s native Australia this year, perhaps for Christmas. The prince met the princess, nee Mary Donaldson, the Tasmanian-born daughter of a math professor, at a Sydney pub during the 2000 summer Olympics.

Chris Jackson/Getty Images

The focus this year during January, National Birth Defects Prevention Month, is on the judicious use of medicines before, during and after pregnancy.

That goes for prescription and over-the counter drugs, as well as herbal remedies and dietary supplements.

Perhaps two-thirds of women use some kind of medication during pregnancy, according to the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, Ga. Yet many of the effects of these drugs are poorly understood.

Pregnant women are often excluded from drug trials because of concerns for their unborn babies. As a result, we often know little about how drugs will affect fetuses.

Birth defects affect about 3 percent of babies born in the United States and cause more than 20 percent of infant deaths, according to the CDC.

Talk about your scheduled C-section. A Machesney Park, Ill., couple went out of their way last weekend to have their twins born in two different years.

Ashley Fansler, 23, and Brendan Lewis, 24, welcomed daughter Madisen Carin Lewis at 11:59 p.m. on New Year's Eve. Aiden Everette Lewis was born a minute later, at 12 a.m. on New Year's Day.

The twins were born by Cesarean section at Rockford Memorial Hospital in Rockford, Ill.

The couple and their doctors purposefully timed the scheduled C-section so the babies could have separate birthdays. Fansler's due date was Jan. 28 but doctors reportedly were concerned about complications.

"We decided to do it that way [bridging the new year] and everything worked out,” Lewis told Matt Williams of the Rockford Register Star. “They said they would do it if there was no complications or anything. Everything was safety first.”

Check out footage of the parents and the newborns here:

"I'm BAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAACK! : )"

That's what Laura Eckert, a Shueyville, Ia., photographer, wrote today on the Facebook page for her New Creation birth photography business.

Facebook had disabled the page last month because it displayed photos taken during and just after childbirth. Earlier today, though, officials of the social media website apologized to Eckert and restored her company's page.

Eckert, 33, told the Associated Press she was shocked when Facebook notified her before Christmas that they had removed inappropriate photos from her page. Eckert said she had cropped all the photos on the New Creation page so they would meet Facebook's guidelines.

When she tried to log on to find out which photos were gone, Eckert discovered the account had been disabled.

A number of Eckert's supporters put together another Facebook page called "Restore Laura Eckert's account."

The photographer emailed Facebook repeatedly, asking for an explanation and reinstatement, but  the company did not respond until KCRG-TV in Cedar Rapids aired a story about the dispute, she said.

"It's funny it happened after the media got involved," Eckert said. "I sent many polite e-mails asking for information over the course of the last few weeks and got no response. None."

Eckert said she believed the pictures that brought her page down were from a water birth last spring.

Facebook objected to some of the photos when she first posted them because they contained nudity, Eckert said. She then removed some photos and edited others to eliminate any sight of nipples or genitalia, with Facebook's standards in mind.

But then last month, all three of her Facebook pages, including the New Creation one, were gone.

"We make an occasional mistake. This is an example," said Facebook spokesman Simon Axten.

Eckert said she intends to continue to post birth photos on her Facebook page.

"I see the miraculousness of it," she told the AP. "Maybe that clouds my judgment a little bit."

Little Peter Gabriel Imson, born 18 seconds after midnight on Jan. 1 at Guam Memorial Hospital in Tamuning, Guam, has staked his claim to be the first baby born in the United States in 2011.

Guam, the largest of the Mariana Is., is a U.S. territory in Micronesia, in the western Pacific Ocean, and is officially the first place in the United States a new day touches — in this case, the first day of a new year.

Imson weighed in at six pounds 13 ounces. His mom is Cathy Narciso of Dededo, a nurse at the hospital. Peter is her first baby.