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[Grimosaur]

New player here and after my first (failed) goblin seige, I noticed amongst all of my dead ill-equipped military dwarves were 5+ dead dwarven babies as well. Turns out all of my female military dwarves were taking their babies into battle with them. Instead I think dwarves should drop any babies they are carrying whenever they are assigned a squad order. Then the baby's father can come and pick them up for the time being and be given back to the mother when the order has been completed. I know having babies engaging in battle can be a lot of fun when looking back on the combat logs, so perhaps the father coming to pick up the baby can have a very low priority, giving the baby some time to slowly crawl after their mother out into battle and get into some fights themselves, or just some tragic scenarios with them being all on their own. Definitely a more organic way for those scenarios to occur instead of outright being carried into battle.

While I'm at it, if it isn't already implemented, there should be a check whenever a squad order is made for all military dwarves to pick up any available weapons that are assigned to them before they head out into battle. I don't want to switch out all their training weapons to metal ones in the menu and order them into battle at the same time only to find they've all gone out still with their training weapons equipped because squad orders have a higher priority than picking up equipment... or something like that. Don't know if this is already a thing, I just might as well add this while I'm making this post to make sure.

Perhaps there could also be a 'Military Use' flag that can be set in the stocks menu on items you want reserved for your military dwarves so no non-military dwarves can take any weapons or armour for themselves... if that's something that happens as well. Like I said, new player here. Not exactly sure what's a feature and what's not.

[NW_Kohaku]

What's this?  Truly, you ARE a new player if you haven't heard of the hallowed tradition of the fearless dwarven shieldmothers and their short-lived babyshields! (Many players have a "no married women in the military" or even full gender bias "no women in the military" policy to avoid this... others see babyshields as a benefit, as children are rarely of benefit to a fortress that isn't going for generation fort status, and dwarves are quite fecund, anyway.)

In all seriousness, though, I don't think this is the sort of thing that needs suggesting, because Toady's already well aware of it, it's definitely not the sort of behavior Toady intends out of dwarven mothers, and there are bug reports galore about issues like the training weapons thing as well.

For the time being, just make sure to micromanage your dwarves and make sure that they have their proper uniforms before letting them out into battle.  (Using doors and locking them strategically in the face of a dwarf about to head into battle with the wrong equipment is a good way to stop dwarves from doing something stupid. It's also a good way to help make sure the dwarves all arrive on the battlefield at once, rather than trickling out to get slaughtered one at a time.  For that matter, try to rely upon traps first and actually send in your dwarves to fight as a last resort when you're new - you have control over the terrain of the battlefield, so take the greatest advantage of that as you can.)  The uniform menu allows you to be extremely precise about which weapon goes to which dwarf for a reason.

[Moeteru]

A very sensible suggestion. Hopefully it's already planned, but as Kohaku says baby-shields have been a bug/feature for well over a decade at this point.
In regards to squads equipping what you tell them to equip, that's definitely still very broken. It isn't guaranteed that they'll ever try to pick up the items you tell them to wear, let alone do it quickly. As far as I know the only guaranteed way to get all your military dwarves properly dressed is to manually assign specific items to each individual dwarf. If you just use uniforms it might work okay until you start sending them on raids, but sooner or later you'll end up with a bunch of recalcitrant nudists who refuse to get dressed.
Of course it's micromanagement hell and the interface doesn't even let you know that your soldiers are running into battle naked. Green ticks in the equipment screen only indicate that they've chosen an item to wear, not that they're actually wearing it. There are bug reports about two or more dwarves choosing the same item so that probably explains some of the problems.