Until the Affordable Care Act was passed in 2010, 88 percent of individual plans did not cover maternity care.

The nutritional and immunological components of breast milk change every day, according to the specific, individual needs of a baby.

“A whopping 6-plus percent of DNA [in a mother’s blood] in the third trimester can be fetal,”

Studies show that breast-feeding is good for a baby’s immunological health: breast-fed babies have lower instances of colds and viruses.7 And when they do get sick, breast-fed babies are often able to recover quickly because their mother’s body produces the specific antibodies needed to quell their infection.

To produce breast milk, mothers melt their own body fat. Are you with me? We dissolve parts of ourselves, starting with gluteal-femoral fat, a.k.a. our butts and thighs, and turn it into food for our babies.

full-term placenta holds about six ounces of a fetus’s blood, which is about half of a newborn’s blood volume. The infant needs that blood to be in its body when it makes its way to the outside. So how does it get into the baby’s body in time for it to be born? The mighty uterus and its contractions, which squeeze the placenta, force blood through

wonder why we need new mothers to look like we did before we had babies. Why we push ourselves to “get our bodies back.” My body will never go back to what it was; it’s made a person, traveled to another dimension, and given birth to another world. The journey has left more than a few marks. I want to embrace that.

But we know that 80 percent of new mothers report a range of mood changes, and that as many as one in seven mothers will experience postpartum depression and/or anxiety.

Nearly one in four new mothers in America return to work just two weeks after giving birth—but