Polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS) is a notoriously heterogeneous, common reproductive disorder associated with many coexisting conditions, including hyperandrogenemia, obesity, insulin resistance and other signs of metabolic dysfunction. PCOS is often diagnosed in the context of anovulatory infertility. However, more recent research disclosed an association of PCOS with increased chances for pregnancy complications, adverse perinatal outcomes and suboptimal long-term health of children born to women with PCOS. This chapter provides an overview of current literature concerning obstetrical complications in women with PCOS, especially increased risk for gestational diabetes (OR 2.7–2.9), hypertensive disorders of pregnancy (including preeclampsia, OR 1.9–4.2) and preterm birth (OR 1.5–2.2). In addition, information regarding children’s outcomes is provided, including birth weight, cardiovascular health and neurodevelopmental health. Finally, pathological pathways including biomarker data in pregnancy and placenta morphology are discussed.

At 1.5- and five-year follow-ups after the Spitak earthquake, there was a significant dose–response relation between earthquake exposure and severity of PTSD and depression. The more severely exposed Spitak group had higher PTSD and depression scores than the less severely exposed group from Gumri. However, at twenty-five years, this relation had dissipated. PTSD severity of the Spitak group that had experienced comparatively fewer post-earthquake adversities (lack of heat, electricity, food, medicine, housing, transportation) and post-earthquake traumatic experiences (e.g., fights, accidents) was comparable to that of the Gumri group; while depression severity of the Gumri group, which had been significantly lower than the Spitak group at baseline, was higher at follow-up. The detrimental impact of adversities was greater for depression than for PTSD.

Risk factors for PTSD and depression at twenty-five years included adversities, baseline PTSD and separation anxiety severity, loss of home, and chronic medical illnesses. Social support by family and friends emerged as a protective factor. Compared with those who lost one parent and controls, orphans were at greater risk for clinical depression. Although there was a decrease in PTSD rates from baseline to twenty-five years post-earthquake (48% to 22%), earthquake-related PTSD remained a significant public health problem. Alleviation of adversities, improving the social ecology, and monitoring chronic medical illnesses should be considered essential components of disaster recovery programs.

In the aftermath of the First World War, the Elmhirsts saw reforming education as a key to a more harmonious future – a view that that was widely shared. Their vision of an ideal education system was one that promoted learners’ freedom and holistic fulfilment, that was integrated with its rural surroundings and that extended from the cradle to the grave. This chapter looks at Dorothy and Leonard’s efforts to realise this vision, setting them within the context of the flourishing interwar progressive education movement and of wider efforts to promote rural reform, life-long learning and international harmony. Ideologically plastic, unfettered by economic necessity and well-connected, Dartington was the only progressive educational scheme begun in interwar Britain as part of a larger social experiment. It offers a singular demonstration of the cross-fertilisation of progressive education with other holistically-minded programmes that sought to re-think the laissez-faire liberal philosophy of the previous century.

This chapter explores how human children soften the abusive edge of carceral spaces. Prisons, immigration detention centres, and zoos and aquaria are institutions that attract sustained public scrutiny from prisoner rights, migrant rights, anti-racist, and animal rights movements. Among other things, critics contest the messaging that these institutions and their proponents use to assure the public of the need for confinement and the ethical acceptability of the conditions captive animals and humans experience. These discourses, depending on the specific institution, highlight the larger public “law and order” interests of safety and border control, but also “progressive” interests of rehabilitation, conservation, and education. In highlighting these latter “progressive” interests, carceral institutions seek to humanize themselves and their work to bolster their social credibility. This “humane-washing” occurs through long-standing rationales about rehabilitation for offenders in the prison context, and more recent rationales about the conservation of nature and conservation education in the zoo and aquarium context. It also, I will argue, occurs through a specific type of marshaling of the human child. I apply a multispecies lens to consider how the real and imagined human child in the zoo and aquaria context, and narratives about what is in the best interests of human children in the immigration and prison context, figure into characterizing such carceral institutions as legally and socially legitimate spaces.

In economics the labour force comes out of nowhere. Under capitalism children are still produced at home. Under slavery they were reared for profit. Children were reared collectively in kibbutzim and boarding schools. In industrialising Britain child labour paid for itself. Affluent societies rely on communal education. Even private schools are not-for-profit. The slogan of school choice was invented for racial segregation. Its appeal is social separation. For politicians and wealthy backers the charter school/free school/academy model is ideological money-laundering and opportunities for enrichment. Despite three decades of effort school choice has failed. Universities derive their economic support from student fees financed by government loans. This encourages expensive facilities, at the expense of students and staff. Student loans have become a lifelong burden exacerbating inequality. Bringing children to maturity relies on family altruism and public education. Other methods have failed.

Chapter 10 shows how what began with philosophy’s rendering God superfluous ended in a war against the God of Abraham. Here we have the singularity of the Holocaust, which lies in a singular assault on the Jewish people as the perennial witnesses to that God the God of Abraham. Drawing on the testimony of the Holocaust diaries, written within the whirlwind of the assault on God, this chapter demonstrates that this defining feature of the Holocaust can be seen, for example, in the Nazis’ use of the holy calendar in the execution of their actions, in the prohibitions against prayer and Sabbath observance, in the destruction of synagogues and Hebrew Bibles, and in the targeting of children, elders, and mothers. What the diaries reveal about the essence of Holocaust that the historians cannot, it is argued, is this: The Holocaust was the systematic annihilation of not just of the bodies but of the souls of the Jews as a means of annihilating the God of the Jews. It is unprecedented and unparalleled.

This chapter examines forced encampment litigation in Kenya. Refugees living in urban areas resisting facing the prospect of relocation to a refugee camp, as well as refugees living in camps seeking permission to leave have initiated these cases. I examine how judges use human rights in the Kenyan Constitution and rights in the Refugee Convention as prisms to articulate the functions and nature of refuge. I show that Kenyan courts have understood refuge as a process as well as a human rights remedy that must allow refugees to live a liveable life in the present, have hope for the future and heal from past trauma. Judges arrive at these sophisticated understandings of refuge when they identify and reflect on irreducible aspects of refugeehood. However, in more recent cases, Kenyan judges instead focus on the uniqueness of the protection from refuge litigant. This results in conceptualising refuge as a limited commodity that, akin to welfare, must be given to those most in need or most deserving. Nevertheless, a feminist analysis indicates that in identifying the anomalous refugee, Kenyan courts have addressed protection concerns relating to gender, age and disability in a sensitive and nuanced manner.

Focusing on Cormac McCarthy’s The Road and Cherie Dimaline’s The Marrow Thieves, this chapter considers the Child as a conventional figure of futurity – as elucidated by Lee Edelman, Robin Bernstein, Natalia Cecire, Rebecca Evans, and Rebekah Sheldon. What happens to this figure when race becomes explicitly a part of narratives in which children, put into perilous motion by environmental collapse, struggle to find a safe place to grow up? One possible consequence, as Dimaline’s novel illustrates, is the granting to young characters an independent existence from the meanings encoded by the Child. Unlike The Road, which centers the father’s sense of guilt on the son having to find ways to survive in an environmentally destroyed world, The Marrow Thieves centers on young adult characters who struggle to hold together a non-familial community amid an environmental crisis. They think explicitly about how stories can bind them together in the pursuit of common survival even as they can tear individuals apart because of the horrors they recall, and in doing so imagines a future that comes into being in part as a result of the exercise of this agency.