During the mid-twentieth century, Virginia Apgar worked as an obstetrical anesthesiologist and gave drugs to women that reduced their pain during childbirth in the US. In 1953, Apgar created a scoring system, called the Apgar score, that uses five measurements, including heart rate and breathing rate. The Apgar score evaluates newborn infants and determines who needs immediate medical attention. Apgar's work helped decrease infant mortality rates. As of 2020, hospitals around the world use the Apgar score.

Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski published Not of Woman Born in 1990. The book is a historical account of the cesarean birth procedure, hereafter c-section, during the Renaissance in Europe. A c-section is a surgical procedure that medical professionals use to deliver a fetus through an incision in a pregnant person’s abdomen. During the medieval and Renaissance periods, midwives performed c-sections on pregnant women after they had died when there was a chance that the fetus was still alive. They did this so the midwife could get the baby baptized, enabling it to be buried in sacred ground after death. Not of Woman Born traces how the procedure evolved in the late fifteenth and sixteenth century to be more commonly performed by male surgeons, rather than midwives, to save both the mother and the fetus. Blumenfeld-Kosinski provides historical, religious, and cultural context for understanding how people viewed and practiced c-sections in Europe during medieval and Renaissance times, in contrast to how people view and rely on the widespread delivery procedure in modern times.