Miracle Baby: After doctors determined that one of the twins was not growing, Rebecca and Mark Jones of the U.K. had to make the difficult decision to allow doctors to terminate one twin to save the others. Doctors at first tried to sever the umbilical cord to cut off the blood supply to the baby. That procedure didn’t work, so the doctors made a second attempt by cutting the placenta in half. This procedure had the opposite effect - the baby began to grow. In March the babies were born by emergency c-section at 31 weeks, healthy and weighing in at 3 pounds 8 ounces and the miracle baby weighed in at 1 pound 15 ounces. Now 7 months old, both babies are at home and weighing in at 15 pounds and 12 pounds

Drinking while pregnant = nasty kid?: A new study shows that drinking while pregnant seems to be related to conduct problems in the child. Earlier research had linked pre-natal drinking with many problems in offspring, including conduct problems, criminal behavior, attention and impulsivity problems and alcohol disorders. However, this research was in question because it didn’t consider whether certain certain family processes or genetic risk factors could be associated with both maternal drinking and childhood problems. This study was able to show that for each week a mother drank alcohol during pregnancy, the child exhibited an increase in conduct problems. The study, however, showed that other factors related to prenatal alcohol drinking, such as tobacco, illegal drugs and other substances, were more likely causes of attention and impulsivity problems in the offspring rather than alcohol use alone. “the study was able to rule out a host of other explanations for the conduct problems in part because the study included multiple children per mother, which allowed researchers to look at siblings who were exposed differently to alcohol prenatally because their mothers varied their drinking during different pregnancies. The study found that children more frequently exposed to alcohol during pregnancy had more conduct problems than their siblings who were exposed to less prenatal alcohol.”