New therapy bot helps children with autism perfect their social skills
Robotics startup LuxAI has created QTrobot, a bot designed to help children with autism learn valuable social skills.
Child well-being
India aims to criminalize witch doctor practice of branding sick children with hot irons
When a traditional healer burned hot clay into the chest of two-year-old Kushbu Lal, she died. Now moves are afoot to criminalize a practice that continues to cost lives.
U.N. brokers deal to end use of children in Nigeria’s battle with Boko Haram
Officials hail landmark for child protection as youth vigilante group known as Civilian Joint Task Force pledges to draw a line under recruitment of minors
The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child formally comes into effect
The UNCRC is a groundbreaking international human rights treaty ratified by 196 countries (as of 2023) which sets out the civil, political, economic, social, health, and cultural rights of children.
Global child mortality rate plummets from a historical average of 48% to 27% in 1950
As recently as two centuries ago, around 1 in 2 children died before reaching the end of puberty. Our ancestors were often largely powerless against poverty, famine, and disease, and these calamities were especially devastating for children. Since then, child mortality has plummeted across the world. This dramatic decline has resulted from better nutrition, clean water, sanitation, neonatal healthcare, vaccinations, medicines, and reductions in poverty, conflicts, and famine.
The Soviet Union becomes the first modern state in the world to formally legalize abortion
In October 1920, the Bolsheviks under Vladimir Lenin made abortion legal within the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic with their “Decree on Women’s Healthcare”. After the RSFSR, the law was introduced in Ukraine in July 1921 and then the remainder of the Soviet Union. The government saw legalization as a temporary necessity, as after the economic crisis and nearly a decade of unrest, war, revolution, and civil war, many women would be seeking abortions due to not being able to take care of their child.
Jacob Nufer of Switzerland performs the first known Cesarean Section birth with both mother and baby surviving
Perhaps the first written record we have of a mother and baby surviving a cesarean section comes from Switzerland in 1500 when sow gelder, Jacob Nufer, performed the operation on his wife. The mother lived and subsequently gave birth normally to five children, including twins. The cesarean baby lived to be 77 years old.