“It’s not primarily that we get a different bundle of services when we have a baby,” Gerard Anderson, an economist at the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health who studies international health costs, told the Times. “It’s that we pay individually for each service and pay more for the services we receive.”

This is an unusual model among other countries, as the Times notes:

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After some confusion, the counselor replies inaccurately, “It sounds like the morning after pill. If you have intercourse and then take this pill and it causes a period to come on or something, or bleeding. It’s like having kind of an abortion.” She adds, “That could harm you. It really could harm you ... You could hemorrhage from anything like that.”

“Kate” is Katie Stack, a 24-year-old pro-choice activist and patients’ advocate at an Ohio abortion clinic, though she gave the counselor a different last name. Stack is also a founder of the Crisis Project, which films undercover video at crisis pregnancy centers like Cleveland’s Womankind and records the often medically suspect advice given there. And Womankind is one of thousands of clinics across the country that seek to dissuade women from having abortions. Unlike many of those centers, which gauzily gloss over whether they're actually clinics, it actually offers prenatal care from medical professionals, but that doesn't mean it dispenses accurate information.

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Much of the data on what aging means for making babies is anything but hard and fast: Studies contradict studies; anecdotal evidence refutes other anecdotal evidence. It's a trend that Jean Twenge noted in a recent piece for the Atlantic in which she tried to answer the question "How long can you wait to have a baby?"

But as Twenge discovered through her reporting, available research is limited and outdated, despite what an avalanche of magazine features say: "While the data on natural fertility among modern women are proliferating, they are still sparse. Collectively, the three modern studies [on fertility] included only about 400 women 35 or older, and they might not be representative of all such women trying to conceive."

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“Before, when my friends on the left side of the aisle here tried to make rape and incest the subject — because, you know, the incidence of rape resulting in pregnancy are very low,” Franks said, according to the Washington Post. He continued: “But when you make that exception, there’s usually a requirement to report the rape within 48 hours. And in this case that’s impossible because this is in the sixth month of gestation. And that’s what completely negates and vitiates the purpose for such an amendment.”

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In his April ruling, Judge Edward Korman ordered the Food and Drug Administration to make levonorgestrel-based emergency contraception available over-the-counter without age or point of sale restriction, excoriating the administration for attempting to block women's access to contraception and engaging "in intolerable delays... that could accurately be described as an administrative agency filibuster." Korman also called U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius' position on emergency contraception “politically motivated, scientifically unjustified, and contrary to agency precedent.”

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According to the NWLC, the complaints were filed against a mix of private and public institutions, including Battelle Memorial Institute, Beacon Health System, Auburn University, Gonzaga University and the Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education.

The suit alleges that each of these employers violated a provision of the healthcare law protecting individuals from sex discrimination by failing to provide comprehensive maternity coverage to female dependents of its employees; a gap that effectively treats pregnancy as a different class of care, and denies female dependents less comprehensive health coverage than their male counterparts.

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Actually, as it turns out, breast-feeding is really f’n hard -- despite the claims of every baby book, blog, doctor, midwife, woman and some men (who always seem to be fans of anything having to do with boobs). Is there a chance that your baby will pop out and land square on your boob, latch perfectly and nourish itself with no problems whatsoever? Yes, of course (and yes, of course, I will want to slap you as a result), but I believe there needs to be a very real shift in expectations among pregnant women when it comes to their breast-feeding capabilities.

As it stands now, we are all told that breast-feeding is the ONLY option for feeding your child if you actually love that child and want them to ever have more than a third-grade-level reading ability. If you don’t breast-feed your baby, you might as well just immediately drop it off at your local prison because that is where it’s going to end up anyway after such a horrible start to its life. Breast-feeding is beautiful and natural and the best and only socially acceptable way to nourish your baby. It is the most natural thing on the planet, you see.

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The discussion prompts I prepared were politically neutral, meant to promote deeper thinking about all perspectives of the debate, but when I put it together I knew what side I was on. I’ve been pro-choice since before I even understood what was at stake. And yet, when I chose to have a baby while still in my allegedly fertile late-20s, all I could produce were the kind of clots sucked out during a D&C. I chose baby. Where was my baby?

I still don’t know. I mean, I know where my babies are. The end results of pregnancies No. 4 and No. 5 are now bounding preschoolers with scraped knees and very firm opinions about tomatoes (one for and one against). I am lucky among people who choose to reproduce in that I eventually got to. I would like to say that my son and daughter are the children always intended for me by some force that I don’t understand and probably don’t believe in; that those other pregnancies were just my real kids making RSVPs they couldn’t keep, but that’s just not how I feel. It doesn’t make any sense to me, at least not intellectually, but I feel like I have five children — two born and three who were not born, which is a point-of-view that is hard to reconcile with being pro-choice.

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The couple gave birth to their first child, daughter Blue Ivy Carter, in January of 2012. The singer recently told ABC News that she "would like more children," and rumors of her pregnancy hit the Internet when bloggers identified a small bulge around her waist on Monday. On Tuesday, the singer raised suspicions further by canceling a concert in Belgium due to "heat and exhaustion."

Of course, Jay-Z's rep had no comment and Beyoncé's rep could not be reached for comment by E!, so the speculation on whether or not a baby bump will soon protrude from Beyoncé's belly will continue until the appearance of said baby bump makes the speculation pointless.

Perhaps Kate Middleton can hold us over until then.

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“There's the cervix,” she said, as though I'd driven two hours to get the inside scoop on my cervix. “And there's the placenta.” She ran a computer curser over a fuzzy white mass.

But I wanted a profile or a full-body shot, some image that would tell my brain, Yes, there's a person in there, which would tell my heart, Yes, you can risk loving this person.

Right now it was still an it, and I still called it “Baby X.” Right now I still imagined a giant mathematical variable in my pelvis, offering a host of faceless unknowns.

But the tech held off on the print-worthy images and dwelled instead on organs. A flapping, four-chambered heart. A black marble of a spleen. Look, there's the brain: two hemispheres inside a globe.

Finally, the face. “There,” she said.

Except it was not the usual ultrasound profile of sloping forehead, dainty nose, and chin. It was a square shot, and I saw deep and ghostly eyeball cavities. The angular bone structure of the cheeks. A black opening for a mouth, gaping wide. It was a skull in my uterus. A Halloween icon floating in my womb.

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I was 21, and for nine months in the mid-1990s, I worked as a hotline counselor on the toll-free line at the National Abortion Federation, a voluntary membership group of several hundred providers nationwide. Overtly, the job went like this: Women called to ask for a clinic near them, and I provided the address and phone number. Each clinic had been vetted by a NAF inspector. The clinics I could mention were not the only clinics out there. They met certain standards and agreed to pay a membership fee for the referral service.

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Korean children get a lot of fuss made over them, I guess because life was tough in the old country, and it was a big deal if you survived. There’s a big party thrown when you are 100 days old, followed by another when you make it to one whole year. My parents took a lot of pictures of me at these parties, although I don’t remember a thing as I was really drunk at both. From the pictures I see the cake, though — all these big multicolored rice cakes, each pastel stripe a steamed layer of pounded and steamed rice flour, not sweet like birthday cake but a delicious treat all the same. It looks like a chewy Neapolitan ice cream, or a gay pride flag made of carbs. It’s the best and I want it, but I think wanting that cake isn’t enough reason to have a baby.

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She tweeted, "Well, Here we go!!" this morning in anticipation, then announced, "I'm pregnant, I'm quite pregnant," on this morning's show. The couple's baby girl is due in June. "I know I'm not the first person to have a baby, but I am having a baby for the first time," Wolfe joked, saying that she plans to write a humorous blog as the pregnancy progresses.

The announcement coincides with a spread in People magazine. “This is the most exciting thing that has ever happened to us,” Wolfe told People. “But I don’t want to bring my daughter into a world where I’m not comfortable telling everyone who I am and who her mother is.”

Gosk and Wolfe are planning to get married, too. “The beauty is that we live in a time where there’s no need for secrecy,” Gosk explains to People. “This is a spectacular moment for us.”

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Paltrow is circumspect about when the pregnancy occurred and exactly how it ended. Just a year ago, she casually brushed off questions about whether she wanted more children, saying, "I don’t know if I can go back to diapers and things like that. I’m so past that, I think I may have missed the window. I think maybe when Moses was 3 I would have done it." Now, however, she says, "My children ask me to have a baby all the time. And you never know, I could squeeze one more in. I am missing my third. I’m thinking about it. But I had a really bad experience when I was pregnant with my third. It didn't work out and I nearly died. So I am like, 'Are we good here or should we go back and try again?'" Paltrow's cryptic reference to the child she says she's "missing" comes within the context of a conversation about her healthy new "It’s All Good" cookbook, which she claims sprang out of a health crisis in which "I was vitamin-D deficient, I had anemia, I had thyroid issues, my liver was congested, I had hormonal imbalances and a benign tumor on my ovary that had to be removed."

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A bystander, 67 year-old Sandra Cook, then asked the duchess, “You were going to say daughter, weren’t you?”

“No, we don’t know,” Middleton replied.

But an update in the Huffington Post quickly deflates any semblance of the rumor:

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"Granted, the percentage of pregnancies due to rape is small because it's an act of violence, because the body is traumatized. I don't know what percentage of pregnancies are due to the violence of rape. Because of the trauma the body goes through," she told the newspaper before arriving at the state GOP's spring convention in Sacramento.

Ironically, she got on the subject while criticizing Rep. Todd Akin, the former Missouri Senate candidate who infamously said women's bodies have a way of shutting down pregnancies in the case of "legitimate rape." "That was an insensitive remark," Greig said. "I'm sure he regretted it. He should have come back and apologized." Greig, however, went on to essentially reaffirm part of Akin's logic.

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Cruz publicist Javier Giner told The Associated Press on Tuesday that the Spanish actress is pregnant.

He declined to provide any further details, including when the baby is due.

The 38-year-old Cruz and 43-year-old Bardem had their first child, a boy called Leo, in January 2011.

The couple became romantically involved after appearing together in Woody Allen's 2008 film "Vicky Cristina Barcelona" and later married.

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Jose Antonio Munoz Serrano, secretary of health for the western state of Jalisco, where the girl lives, said the parents knew their daughter was pregnant for months and did not notify authorities despite her young age, El Universal reported.

Munoz Serrano said authorities were concerned about the girl’s family, with whom she is living with her baby girl, CNN Mexico reported.

“We are worried that the girl’s parents didn’t notify the health sector about their daughter’s pregnancy so that she could receive medical attention during her pregnancy,” he said.

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I’ll be writing about this in the months to come, but for today, here’s one way having a family can cost you your job: women still get fired for being pregnant. Although it’s been illegal since the 1978 Pregnancy Discrimination Act, women are still refused a job or let go if they’re pregnant. You’d be shocked, EEOC and employment law folks tell me, at how often employers say so point-blank: Come back after you have the baby. The guys don’t want to look at a pregnant waitress. Housekeeping is hard work; your pregnancy is a potential liability. Our customers are uncomfortable with a pregnant driver.

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