Losing a baby, new research shows, often affects women significantly longer than their male companions.

It is well known that mothers begin to develop a bond with their children before they’re even born. Miscarriage can leave a woman devastated. Research has shown that this proves true for men as well, especially in cases of planned pregnancy.

Several researchers from the Chinese University of Hong Kong and the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology recruited 83 heterosexual couples who’d experienced a miscarriage. Researchers followed these couples for a year, assessing the psychological and emotional effects of miscarriage on men versus women.

As many as two in five men experienced significant psychological distress immediately following a miscarriage, compared to just over half of women. This dropped after three months, when about 7 percent of men and 20 percent of women continued to experience grief and depressive symptoms.

Men’s grief leveled after the three-month mark, while women’s symptoms declined more slowly. By the end of the study, men and women experienced similar rates of depressive symptoms, at 5 and 8 percent, respectively.

“Although the psychological impact of miscarriage on men was less enduring when compared with that on women, a significant proportion of men demonstrated psychological distress after miscarriage,” authors of the study concluded.

Creating a solid support network can help couples cope with the pain of a lost pregnancy. Find support in Healia’s Pregnancy Loss Community, or see the study in the British Journal of Obstetrics&Gynecology.

Melinda Gates, wife of Microsoft chairman Bill Gates and co-chair of the Gates Foundation, has generously pledged $1.5 billion to help stop maternal death, or death after childbirth. Although rates are decreasing, Gates says it's time for the world to come together to save women's and children's lives.

“It’s not that the world doesn’t know how to save the 350,000 mothers and 3 million newborns that die every year,” she told The Seattle Times. “It is that we haven’t tried hard enough.”

These numbers have dropped by about 30 percent since 1980, but according to this year’s Countdown to 2015 report by the World Health Organization nearly 2 million deaths occur each year as a result of childbirth and labor complications alone. For many countries, maternal and infant mortality rates remain unchanged.

Hemorrhage and hypertension top the list of causes for maternal death, followed shortly by HIV/AIDS, malaria, and heart disease. Infection after childbirth also presents a threat to mothers, while pneumonia, malaria and diarrhea pose the greatest threats to newborns.

Women Deliver, the advocacy group that received the donation, has set goals to help increase maternal survival. Methods include greater access to family planning tools, prenatal care and access to better healthcare. They also hope to change attitudes about maternal death.

"In many countries the belief that death is inevitable, and therefore acceptable, hasn't yet changed," Gates told MSNBC. "We don't have to tolerate fatalism.”

Read more from MSNBC and The Seattle Times, or learn how you can help by visiting Women Deliver online.

Parents-to-be everywhere may have another reason to jump for joy. A new, highly accurate blood test may be able to tell you the sex of your baby earlier in your pregnancy.

Most couples have to wait until the second trimester of pregnancy (4-6 months), but the simple test could cut that time in half—as early as seven weeks. The test is highly accurate, too. Of the 201 women who were tested between 2003 and 2009, researchers were able to obtain sufficient samples from 189 and produce 100 percent accurate results.

When a woman is pregnant, her body will circulate her blood with blood from the fetus. For this test, a sample of the mother’s blood is screened for genes unique to the Y-chromosome of males. If these genes were present, researchers predicted a boy.

Early testing can also help doctors detect conditions such as Down’s syndrome and Rhesus-D disease (RhD). This method of testing has several advantages over invasive methods, such as fetal blood sampling (FBS), that can cause amniotic fluid leaking or miscarriage.

RhD sometimes results from a blood incompatibility between, for example, an Rh-positive mother and an Rh-negative child. If the mother’s body detects this difference, it may send antibodies against the baby. If it goes untreated, it can lead to jaundice, anemia, brain damage or stillbirth.

 “Noninvasive prenatal diagnosis of fetal Rhesus D genotype is sensitive and accurate and has been widely validated in Europe,” authors noted. “The United States should begin to undertake clinical trials to bring this technology to patient care as soon as possible.”

This test is currently not available to the general public, but continued success could mean it’s on the horizon. Its adoption into general health practices could help cut the risk of fetal complications of RhD.

The study was published in Obstetrics&Gynecology.