In the 2007 paper “Traditional postpartum practices and rituals: a qualitative systematic review,” Toronto-based researchers showed that women from different cultures around the world follow similar postpartum practices after giving birth. At the University of Toronto in Toronto, Canada, Cindy-Lee Dennis, Kenneth Fung, Sophie Grigoriadis, Gail Erlick Robinson, Sarah Romans, and Lori Ross examined fifty-one studies from over twenty countries that focused on traditional postpartum practices. The authors found that across the twenty countries, each culture’s postpartum practice included a specified rest period, a prescribed diet, and organized support from family members. In the literature review, Dennis and her team concluded that healthcare providers should consider the major similarities between cultural postpartum practices to deliver culturally competent perinatal care.

In March 1996, the National Academy of Sciences of the United States released 'Veterans and Agent Orange Update 1996: Summary and Research Highlights,' which summarized research on the health effects of Agent Orange and other herbicides used in the Vietnam War. In their 1996 report, the National Academy connects Agent Orange exposure with two health conditions: spina bifida, a birth defect that occurs when the spinal cord develops improperly, and peripheral neuropathy, a nervous system condition in which the peripheral nerves are damaged. Spina bifida was the first birth defect to linked to Agent Orange exposure. The resulting disability compensation for affected children, as a result of the conclusions in the 1996 report, marked the first time that the US Veterans Administration addressed the health outcomes of veterans' families, and not exclusively veterans themselves.

Sprayed extensively by the US military in Vietnam, Agent Orange contained a dioxin contaminant later found to be toxic to humans. Despite reports by Vietnamese citizens and Vietnam War veterans of increased rates of stillbirths and birth defects in their children, studies in the 1980s showed conflicting evidence for an association between the two. In 1996, the US National Academy of Sciences reported that there was evidence that suggested dioxin and Agent Orange exposure caused spina bifida, a birth defect in which the spinal cord develops improperly. The US Department of Veterans Affairs' subsequent provision of disability compensation for spina bifida-affected children marked the US government's first official acknowledgement of a link between Agent Orange and birth defects. By 2016, spina bifida and related neural tube defects were the only birth defects associated with Agent Orange.

Spina bifida is a birth defect that affects the spines of developing fetuses and infants, and research in the 20th century indicated that chemicals in the herbicide Agent Orange likely lead to the birth defect. People with spina bifida can have nerve damage, paralysis, and mental disabilities. During the Vietnam War in the 1960s, the US military employed Agent Orange and other herbicides to destroy enemy crops and forest cover until 1970. Though studies of the link between Agent Orange exposure and birth defects were at first inconclusive, in 1995 the US National Academy of Sciences concluded that one birth defect, spina bifida, was associated with paternal Agent Orange exposure. Spina bifida was, by the twenty-first century, the only birth defect that the US Veterans Administration connected to Agent Orange exposure.

In her 2001 paper “Predictors of Postpartum Depression: An Update,” researcher Cheryl Tatano Beck presents the most common risk factors associated with postpartum depression in women. Postpartum depression occurs when women experience symptoms such as tearfulness, extreme mood changes, and loss of appetite for a lengthened period after giving birth. At the University of Connecticut in Storrs, Connecticut, nursing professor Beck updated a previous study of hers by analyzing literature about postpartum depression published in the 1990s. Beck found four predictors of postpartum depression that she had not included in her previous study. “Predictors of Postpartum Depression: An Update” presents risk factors that healthcare professionals can use to predict whether pregnant women are more likely to develop postpartum depression.

In 1998 and 1999, Teraporn Vutyavanich, Theerajana Kraisarin, and Rung-Aroon Ruangsri in Thailand showed that ginger alleviated nausea in pregnant women. Vutyavanich and his colleagues found that the group of pregnant women who took ginger capsules reported significantly fewer nausea symptoms and vomiting episodes than the group who only received the placebo. Vutyavanich and his team’s study at Chiang Mai University in Chiang Mai, Thailand, was one of the earliest to investigate and support the use of ginger as an effective treatment for relieving pregnancy-related nausea and vomiting.

In 1984, J. David Erickson and his research team published the results of a study titled 'Vietnam Veterans' Risks for Fathering Babies with Birth Defects' that indicated that Vietnam veterans were at increased risk of fathering infants with serious congenital malformations, or birth defects. Researchers at the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) in Atlanta, Georgia, conducted the study to address Though the study's results were inconclusive, the study was one of the first to document a possible association between Vietnam War service and spina bifida, a lower back birth defect in which the spinal cord does not form properly. Later research established the links between Agent Orange exposure and various birth defects and led the US Department of Veterans Affairs to offer disability compensation for Vietnam veterans and their families who were affected by Agent Orange exposure.

In 1978 Social Science and Medicine published Barbara L.K. Pillsbury's article, 'Doing the Month': Confinement and Convalescence of Chinese Women After Childbirth, which summarized the results of Pillsbury's study on Chinese childbirth customs. Pillsbury, a professor of cultural anthropology at San Diego State University in San Diego, California, conducted over eighty interviews with people in Taiwan and China, including civilians, herbalists, and physicians over a four-month period in 1975. She aimed to highlight how a traditional Chinese post-childbirth custom known as zuo yuezi (sitting the month) persisted in modern Chinese society. The practice refers to the month-long period that women who have just given birth must spend resting, or in convalescence, adhering to a strict set of rules that address dietary needs and other cultural rituals. Pillsbury's Doing the Month provides a description and analysis of zuo yuezi (sitting the month), highlighting how traditional Chinese medicine persists in an increasingly westernized Chinese society, specifically in the case of childbirth and reproductive medicine.

In 2004, Shu-Shya Heh, Lindsey Coombes, and Helen Bartlett studied the association between Chinese postpartum (post-childbirth) practices and postpartum depression in Taiwanese women. The researchers surveyed Taiwanese women about the social support they received after giving birth and then evaluated the depression rates in the same women. Heh and her colleagues focused on the month following childbirth, which according to traditional Chinese medicine, is an important period that warrants a set of specialized practices to aid the woman's recovery. Collectively called zuoyuezi (doing the month), the postpartum practices require the help of someone else, typically the woman's mother or mother-in-law, to complete. Heh and her colleagues found that generally, Taiwanese women with more social support displayed fewer postpartum depressive symptoms, and concluded that the practice of doing the month helped prevent postpartum depression in Taiwanese women.

In 1988, the US Centers for Disease Control published 'Health Status of Vietnam Veterans III. Reproductive Outcomes and Child Health,' which summarized part of the results of the Vietnam Experience Study commissioned by US Congress to assess the health of US Vietnam veterans. They published the article in the Journal of the American Medical Association. The most heavily used herbicide in the Vietnam, Agent Orange, had previously been found to contain a contaminant linked to birth defects in rats. By comparing the health of Vietnam War veterans exposed to Agent Orange in Vietnam to those serving elsewhere, researchers determined that veterans who served within Vietnam more frequently reported health problems for themselves and their children, but were not at increased risk of fathering children with birth defects. Later studies overturned that latter conclusion and definitively linked Agent Orange exposure to later birth defects. The article represented the first attempt by the US government to ascertain the full risk of birth defects posed by Agent Orange, which eventually culminated in 1997 when the US Veterans Administration compensating the families of Vietnam veterans for Agent Orange-related birth defects.