In 2014, Flor M. Munoz and colleagues published “Safety and Immunogenicity of Tetanus Diphtheria and Acellular Pertussis (Tdap) Immunization During Pregnancy in Mothers and Infants: A Randomized Clinical Trial,” hereafter “Tdap Immunization During Pregnancy,” in the Journal of the American Medical Association. The authors conducted a study to determine how Tdap immunization affected the mother and infant’s immune response to the common childhood diseases tetanus, diphtheria, and pertussis. They found that Tdap immunization did not lead to an increased risk of adverse health events. Furthermore, maternal Tdap immunization provided the infant with protective levels of pertussis antibodies after delivery and did not affect the infant differently from the DTaP vaccination series, which is the version of Tdap for young children. The authors’ findings in “Tdap Immunization During Pregnancy” supported the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s, or CDC’s, recommendation for pregnant women to receive the Tdap vaccine to prevent disease in mother and infant.

In 1980 the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the US National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) released a report titled, “National Institutes of Health Consensus Development Conference Statement September 22–24, 1980.” The report lists recommendations for birth delivery through cesarean sections, a surgical procedure used to deliver the fetus via the pregnant woman’s abdomen. The recommendations arose from the 1980 Consensus Development Conference on Cesarean Childbirth in Bethesda, Maryland. Medical professionals, consumers, and biomedical research scientists attended the conference, and the NIH’s taskforce on the subject helped facilitate discussions regarding the safety of cesarean sections. The NIH taskforce concluded that cesarean section rates can be decreased and possibly reversed in addition to improving maternal and fetal outcomes and provided recommendations for future research on cesarean sections.

In 1843, physician Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote and published The Contagiousness of Puerperal Fever, an essay about puerperal fever, a disease that occurs mainly as a result of bacterial infection in the uterine tract of women after giving birth or undergoing an abortion. In the essay, Holmes argues that puerperal fever is spread through birth attendants like physicians and midwives who make contact with the disease and carry it from patient to patient. The article was published in The New England Quarterly Journal of Medicine and Surgery in 1843. Holmes, who lived in Boston, Massachusetts, later republished his essay as a private publication in 1855 with a different title, Puerperal Fever as a Private Pestilence. Holmes's essay was one of the first publications to present puerperal fever as a contagious disease and to discuss preventative measures to inhibit the spread of puerperal fever, which helped preserve the lives of pregnant women and their newborns.

In 1914, Margaret Sanger published “Family Limitations,” a pamphlet describing six different types of contraceptive methods. At the time Sanger published the pamphlet, the federal Comstock Act of 1873 had made distributing contraceptive and abortion information through the US postal service illegal. The Comstock Act classified contraceptive information as obscene and limited the amount of information available to individuals about preventing pregnancies. In 1915, Sanger’s husband was charged with violating the Comstock Act for distributing “Family Limitations” and was sent to jail for 30 days. The case sparked many birth control activists to lobby for the repeal of the Comstock Act. By inciting controversy during a time when the Comstock Act limited contraception access, Sanger’s pamphlet “Family Limitations” increased women’s knowledge about various methods of preventing pregnancy.

In 1958, Irving Freiler Stein Sr. published “The Stein-Leventhal Syndrome: A Curable Form of Sterility” documenting his findings on the diagnosis and surgical treatment of Stein-Leventhal syndrome. Stein-Leventhal syndrome, later called polycystic ovarian syndrome (PCOS), affects the reproductive health of women. Common symptoms include excess body hair, a lack of menstrual cycle or amenorrhea, and infertility. As of 2017, polycystic ovarian syndrome is considered the most common reproductive health disorder among women in the United States. In his article, Stein argued that the means of treating infertility and menstruation issues in women with Stein-Leventhal syndrome prior to the 1950s were inferior to surgical removal of ovarian tissue. “The Stein-Leventhal Syndrome: A Curable Form of Sterility” offered a brief view of Stein’s findings over his three decades of research on the syndrome and his opinion on why surgery was the only means of treating the syndrome. The paper’s conclusions allowed later physicians to further their research on the uses of other surgical techniques and medicine to aid in treating the symptoms of the syndrome.

"Casti Connubii," a papal encyclical given by Pope Pius XI on 31 December 1930, served primarily as a reaffirmation and expansion of the issues discussed in Arcanum, an encyclical written by Pope Leo XIII. It was released to address new threats to marriage and conjugal unity, and indeed is translated "On Christian Marriage" or "On Chastity in Marriage." The document explores the meaning of Christian marriage and emphasizes its threefold purpose as borrowed from St. Augustine: to produce offspring, to grow in conjugal faith, and to show benefit from the sacrament. It begins by exploring the nature of marriage, followed by a discussion of its advantages for individuals and societies, erroneous but common beliefs about marriage, threats to pure marriage, and finally how to address them. Included in the threats to pure marriage is that of the growing popularity of contraception and abortive procedures, at which point Pope Pius XI elaborates on the Church' s statement that life begins at conception.

First published in 1930 and reprinted in 1972, Edward Stuart Russell's The Interpretation of Development and Heredity is a work of philosophical and theoretical biology. In this book Russell outlines a methodological and philosophical program aimed at reorienting the biological understanding of development and heredity. He argues that the mechanistic perspective on development and heredity ignores aspects of biological phenomena that can only be analyzed if biologists view organisms as whole entities, rather than breaking down developmental and hereditary processes into small causal units. This book is representative of Russell's broad philosophical approach to biology, called "organicism".

In 2002, the Writing Group for the Women's Health Initiative Investigators published the article Risks and Benefits of Estrogen Plus Progestin in Healthy, Postmenopausal Women: Principal Results from the Women's Health Initiative Randomized Controlled Trial in The Journal of the American Medical Association. In the article, the authors report on the Women's Health Initiative, which was a study initiated by the National Institutes of Health to determine the effects of hormone therapy in postmenopausal women, or women whose menstrual cycles have stopped, from the ages of fifty to seventy-nine. The researchers attempted to determine if a link existed between a common type of hormone therapy, a combination of estrogen and progestin, and prevalent diseases in postmenopausal women, including cardiovascular disease and cancer. As reported by the authors in their article, the researchers discontinued the study after five years when they found that there were many risks associated with the use of estrogen plus progestin hormone therapy, including increased risks of breast cancer and heart diseases.

In 1953, Raymond Greene and Katharina Dalton, who were doctors in the UK, published The Premenstrual Syndrome in the British Medical Journal. In their article, Dalton and Greene established the term premenstrual syndrome (PMS). The authors defined PMS as a cluster of symptoms that include bloating, breast pain, migraine-headache, fatigue, anxiety, depression, and irritability. The article states that the symptoms begin one to two weeks before menstruation during the luteal phase of the menstrual cycle, and they disappear upon the onset of the menstrual period. Menstruation is the monthly series of changes a woman's body undergoes in preparation for the possibility of pregnancy. Dalton and Greene described how progesterone affected women during different phases of their menstrual cycles. The paper convinced many about the phenomenon of PMS, and docotors and scientists adopted Dalton's and Green's term. The paper furthered research about the role of hormones in physiology and of conditions linked to the reproductive system.

In 2004 Mark Landon and his colleagues in the United States published “Maternal and Perinatal Outcomes Associated with a Trial of Labor after Prior Cesarean Delivery,” which compared the risks of vaginal delivery and cesarean section for delivery of a fetus after a previous cesarean delivery. During a cesarean section, a physician surgically removes a fetus from a pregnant woman through an incision in her abdomen. By the late 1900s, most clinical guidelines viewed attempting a vaginal birth after a previous cesarean delivery as a reasonable option for most women. Yet, physicians often noticed an increased risk of uterine ruptures as more patients underwent vaginal deliveries following previous cesarean sections. As such, many physicians continued to recommend cesarean deliveries for women who had a past cesarean section. Landon and his team evaluated the risks of both delivery methods and published their results in the New England Journal of Medicine in 2004. In “Maternal and Perinatal Outcomes,” the authors found that there was no significant difference between the risks of vaginal birth after cesarean and repeat cesarean sections, providing more evidence for clinical guidelines recommending vaginal births after cesarean sections.