In a clinical trial from 1969 to 1972, Sir Graham Collingwood Liggins and Ross Howie showed that if doctors treat pregnant women with corticosteroids before those women deliver prematurely, then those women's infants have fewer cases of respiratory distress syndrome than do similarly premature infants of women not treated with corticosteroids. Prior to the study, premature infants born before 32 weeks of gestation often died of respiratory distress syndrome, or the inability to inflate immature lungs. Liggins and Howie, then both at the University of Auckland in Auckland, New Zealand, published their results in A Controlled Trial of Antepartum Glucorticoid Treatment for Prevention of the Respiratory Distress Syndrome in Premature Infants in 1972. The study built on experiments Liggins had earlier conducted with sheep. Liggins' corticosteroid experiments changed the way doctors treated pregnant women experiencing preterm labors, and they improved the life expectancy of prematurely born infants.

In September 2018, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, or ACOG, published “Labor and Delivery Management of Women with Human Immunodeficiency Virus Infection,” hereafter “Labor and Delivery Management.” It appeared as ACOG Committee Opinion Number 751 in the journal Obstetrics & Gynecology. The article contains recommendations for physicians who care for pregnant people with human immunodeficiency virus, or HIV, to reduce the risk of transmission of the virus from parent to child. Those recommendations include treating pregnant people with HIV therapies, consistently testing and monitoring the levels of HIV in a pregnant person’s blood, and scheduling a cesarean section, or C-section, rather than a vaginal birth to reduce transmission risk in some cases. “Labor and Delivery Management” provides recommendations for physicians to decrease the risk of mother-to-child transmission and emphasizes that physicians and pregnant people make decisions regarding labor and delivery together.