How do you help a woman in labor? The Prepared Partner is an educational video game about labor and childbirth, intended to teach mothers, birth partners, and everybody else about different natural ways to help a woman in labor. In the game, the player sees up to 50 nonpharmacological pain relief, comfort, and relaxation methods that he or she can suggest to the mother — and can help her have a...

James Young Simpson was one of the first obstetricians to administer anesthesia during childbirth in nineteenth century Scotland. Before his work in the 1800s, physicians had few ways to reduce the pain of childbirth. Simpson experimented with the use of ether and chloroform, both gaseous chemicals, to temporarily relieve pain. He found that those chemicals both successfully inhibited the pain ...

BACKGROUND Women's satisfaction with childbirth is an important measure of the quality of maternity care services. This study aims to address factors related to women's childbirth satisfaction in physiological and routine childbirth groups. MATERIALS AND METHODS This descriptive-analytical study was conducted among 340 women in physiological and routine childbirth groups in 2012. Women were s...

Many developing countries periodically face large adverse shocks to their economies. We study two distinct types of such shocks large declines in the price of a country’s commodity exports and severe natural disasters , both of which have occurred frequently in the recent past. Unsurprisingly, adverse shocks reduce the short-term growth of constant-price GDP and we analyze which structural poli...

In 2003, the Japanese Diet passed legislation to abolish part of the special deduction for spouses (Haigusha Tokubetsu Kojo) which would take effect in the 2004 tax year. This paper investigates the impact of this tax reform on female labour supply in Japan. A number of earlier studies have shown that married women are likely to adjust their labour supply in order for their husbands to become e...

Not all eligible women use the available services under India's Janani Suraksha Yojana (JSY), which provides cash incentives to encourage pregnant women to use institutional care for childbirth; limited evidence exists on demand-side factors associated with low program uptake. This study explores the views of women and ASHAs (community health workers) on the use of the JSY and institutional del...

Humans everywhere cooperate in groups to achieve benefits not attainable by individuals. Individual effort is often not automatically tied to a proportionate share of group benefits. This decoupling allows for free-riding, a strategy that (absent countermeasures) outcompetes cooperation. Empirically and formally, punishment potentially solves the evolutionary puzzle of group cooperation. Nevert...

In antagonistic symbioses, such as host-parasite interactions, one population's success is the other's loss. In mutualistic symbioses, such as division of labor, both parties can gain, but they might have different preferences over the possible mutualistic arrangements. The rates of evolution of the two populations in a symbiosis are important determinants of which population will be more succe...