Pregnancy Care

Prenatal care is the health care you receive while pregnant: regular checkups, monitoring, and prenatal testing, usually with an obstetrician or a midwife. Its purpose is simple and powerful: regular visits let your care team catch and treat problems early, track your baby's growth, and prepare you for birth. Early treatment can resolve many problems and prevent others from developing, which is why care should begin as soon as you think you're pregnant.

A typical schedule for routine pregnancies runs about monthly through week 28, twice a month from weeks 28 to 36, then weekly until delivery. Pregnancies considered higher risk are usually seen more often. What counts as higher risk is a clinical judgment that turns on your health history and how the pregnancy is going, not on a single age cutoff, and your own schedule is set by your provider.

The first visit is the longest: a full health history, a physical exam, blood and urine tests, blood pressure, and calculating your due date. It's also the visit where honest answers matter most, because your history shapes the whole plan of care. Later routine visits are shorter and rhythmic: blood pressure and weight, the baby's heart rate, and measuring your abdomen to track growth.

Screening tests arrive in waves: combined screening early in pregnancy (around weeks 11 to 14), a detailed anatomy ultrasound, glucose screening for gestational diabetes (around weeks 26 to 28), and a Group B strep test near term (weeks 36 to 37). Which tests fit your pregnancy is a conversation with your clinician; this page is general education, and your provider will explain what each test is for and what the results mean.

Maternity care in this directory comes from several provider types: obstetricians (OB-GYNs), certified nurse-midwives (CNMs), some family medicine physicians who deliver babies, and maternal-fetal medicine (MFM) specialists. Which of them you see, what each takes on, and when care moves between them depends on your pregnancy, the practice, and your plan, so treat it as something to ask about rather than a fixed division.

Good things to ask a practice directly: what kinds of pregnancy do you care for, what happens if mine becomes higher risk, and who attends the birth if my own provider is unavailable. A clinician recommends the level of care that fits your situation, and it can change during a pregnancy. All of these provider types appear in this directory.

Useful questions when you're deciding: Who attends the birth if my provider is unavailable? Where do you deliver, and what are that hospital's or birth center's options for labor? How do you handle questions between visits? For midwifery care, what happens if my pregnancy becomes higher risk? For any practice, the practical checks are the same two ProviderQuoHealth shows on every profile: in-network with your insurance and accepting new patients, and maternity care makes a third check worth doing: confirm the hospital or birth center where they deliver is also in-network.

Book early. Maternity practices fill up, first appointments can be scheduled weeks out, and starting care promptly protects the early-pregnancy window where monitoring matters most.

A PCS in the middle of a pregnancy is one of the most common care-navigation challenges military families face. The playbook: request your prenatal records before you move (you're entitled to copies), start booking a new provider as soon as orders are in hand rather than after arrival, and bring your records to the first visit so nothing restarts from zero. If your care runs through the military health system, maternity referrals and plan choices affect where you can deliver, and the guides below walk through how that works locally. Veterans may also have maternity-care options through the veterans health system; the veteran guides below cover eligibility and getting seen.

Two safety notes that outrank everything else on this page. First, the urgent maternal warning signs, which apply during pregnancy and for a full year after delivery. CDC's instruction for every sign on this list is the same, seek medical care immediately, so treat the whole list as one urgent tier rather than something to weigh up: a headache that won't go away or gets worse over time, dizziness or fainting, changes in your vision, a fever of 100.4°F or higher, extreme swelling of your hands or face, trouble breathing, chest pain or a fast-beating heart, severe nausea and throwing up beyond the usual early-pregnancy queasiness, severe belly pain that doesn't go away, your baby moving less than before or stopping, vaginal bleeding or fluid leaking during pregnancy, vaginal bleeding or discharge after delivery (heavy bleeding, clots bigger than an egg, passing tissue, or discharge that smells bad), swelling, redness or pain in one leg or arm, overwhelming tiredness, and thoughts of harming yourself or your baby. For any sign on this list, seek medical care immediately: call 911 or go to the nearest emergency department, and tell them you are pregnant or were pregnant within the last year. Don't wait to see whether it passes, and don't wait on a callback from an office. CDC adds that this list does not cover every symptom: if something just isn't right, or you aren't sure whether it's serious, tell a provider, and tell them you are pregnant or were pregnant within the last year. Don't search a directory in an emergency. Second, mood matters: sadness or anxiety that persists beyond two weeks, or trouble bonding with your baby, can be perinatal depression, which is common and treatable. Call or text 988 for the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline any time, or the National Maternal Mental Health Hotline at 1-833-852-6262 for free, confidential, 24/7 support.