Brenda and Colin Reed, chair and CEO of Ryman Hospitality Properties, are thankful they get to watch their two curious, blue-eyed, 3-year-old twin granddaughters, Olivia and Alice Reed, grow up.

The novel coronavirus, known as COVID-19, is raising concern about the impact of the illness on pregnant women.

To provide additional maternity care and a full spectrum of birthing experience options for patients, Vanderbilt University Medical Center has announced plans to acquire the Nashville location of Baby+Company, a freestanding birthing center that emphasizes a family-centered, low-intervention approach to delivery for uncomplicated pregnancies.

In 1938, Frank Boehm’s parents fled Nazi Germany, where relatives on his father’s side would later be rounded up and sent to the death camps, never to return. “Fortunately, my dad had the vision and foresight to get out of Germany while he still could,” Boehm said.

Vanderbilt researchers have published findings indicating that regardless of whether a woman delivers a child by cesarean section or by vaginal birth, if they fill prescriptions for opioid pain medications early in the postpartum period, they are at increased risk of developing persistent opioid use.

Most women who undergo a cesarean childbirth are prescribed more opioid (narcotic) pain medications than needed upon release from the hospital, a Vanderbilt University Medical Center study shows.

Vanderbilt University Medical Center (VUMC) made history in 1997 when two surgeons pioneered fetal surgery to treat spina bifida, or myelomeningocele, the most common birth defect in the central nervous system.