Reducing risks to the unborn child

2016

If clinicians are to play a leading role in reducing risks to the fetus, they have to think outside the box. Improved pregnancy outcomes require that medical and health professionals, including midwives and nurses, work with others far beyond the confines of the antenatal clinic and the delivery room. For the WHO-estimated 200 million plus conceptions glo-bally each year,1 mostly among disadvantaged groups in disadvantaged (at-risk) areas, the first nine months of life are vulnerable to risks. These risks are not just medical, but also employment, agri-cultural, security, energy and climate risks. Improving care to reduce these varied risks to the fetus inside the womb challenges us to accept a very broad concept of integrated health2 – drawing from

2013

All the pregnant women, their partners and other intimates, and the public health nurses as well as other healthcare and social services personnel who participated in my study made this research possible in the most literate meaning of the word. They opened up their worlds, experiences and activities for me to see and hear. They made time for my study in their busy private and professional lives and shared intimate and sensitive knowledge and experiences about precarious life situations. I am very grateful to each and every one of you! This study was funded by the Finnish Doctoral School for Women' s Studies, the University Alliance Finland (KYME), the Gender inequalities, emotional and aesthetic ' body' or ' embodiment' , the approach often applied to studies of reproductive matters of health (e.g.

The American Journal of Bioethics, 2008

Reasoning about the fetus is a complex, often vexing, challenge. Indeed, at the center of the some of the most provocative and difficult bioethical debates in the last decade are questions about the responsibilities of society, physicians, policymakers, scientists, and pregnant women to embryos and fetuses. Having noted the problems particular to use of the pervasive term 'unborn child,' McCullough and Chervenak propose 'patient' as a clarifying alternative for discourse about the fetus (McCullough and Chervenak 2008), at least for questions in the realm of clinical medicine. According to McCullough and Chervenak, shifting to this language avoids certain connotations brought by 'unborn child,' helpfully highlighting, for instance, the beneficence-rather than rights-based nature of obligations toward early life, as well as what they call the "dependent status" of that life. While we concur with McCullough and Chervenak in rejecting the language of unborn child, we have concerns that the alternative they propose brings dangers of its own.

In the interests of promoting the health and wellbeing of their foetuses, pregnant women are subject to imperatives which expect them to engage in an intense ascetic regime of self-regulation and disciplining of their bodies. This review article draws upon scholarship from the humanities and social sciences on pregnancy, foetal personhood and risk to explain why, at this particular moment in the history of western societies, pregnant women and their foetuses are such potent focal points for regulation, monitoring and control. It is argued that in recent years the foetus has become fetishised as a precious body to the exclusion of the pregnant woman's needs and rights. Biomedical technologies have played an important role in the construction of the contemporary foetal body and the meanings which surround it, as have the discourses and practices of neoliberal politics and risk society.

Sustainable Birth in Disruptive Times, 2021

Lays out and describes our volume as intersectional, for we illustrate how different social hierarchies—of wealth, sexism, racism—intersect to produce suffering and harm for women, newborns, and providers across the globe. We adopt a human rights framework as every chapter shows, implicitly or explicitly, that women’s rights are human rights, that marginalized communities suffer the most when human rights are denied, or that human rights in healthcare are on a collision course with the privatization of health care. Our volume is transdisciplinary because our 50 authors include a range of researchers with clinical, academic, and policy expertise, including midwives, nurses, obstetricians, pediatricians, neonatologists, medical anthropologists, sociologists, public health researchers, social workers, activists, and policy makers. Our volume is science-driven, as it builds upon and reflects the recent scientific consensus on maternal and newborn health that we outline below. Last but not least, our approach is community-driven, as we provide models of birth or maternity care that are based in local and participatory knowledges and practices.

Journal of Medical Ethics, 2013

Despite the wide public outcry over their article, Giubilini and Minerva's arguments in defense of infanticide are nothing new. Peter Singer has become one of the best known philosophers in the world in part because of the attention he has received from defending the practice. Infanticide was such an established part of the culture of ancient Greece and Rome that Christians and Jews became subjects of public mockery for opposing it. Even today, infanticide is consistently practiced in places where the Judeo-Christian tradition does not serve as a moral foundation, such as China and India. But the Judeo-Christian tradition's influence has diminished in the developed West, and as a result it has become more difficult to claim that all members of the species Homo sapiens are persons with an equal right to life. Giubilini and Minerva provide an important example of what follows from the rejection of the sanctity of human life. Even the most ardent defenders of abortion rights cannot deny the science behind the claim a prenatal child is a fellow member of our species, but that-at least to some in our post-Christian world-is not morally significant. What matters is having the interests and capabilities of persons: rationality, self-awareness, the ability engage in loving relationships, etc. Many already reject the personhood of our prenatal children because they do not have these traits, but Giubilini and Minerva make the fairly obvious point that our neonatal children do not have these traits either. Thus, they claim, if one supports abortion for this reason, one should support infanticide on the same basis.

Http Dx Doi Org 10 1080 13698575 2013 876191, 2014

In this introduction, I use my nearly forty years of work in the area to reflect on the total medicalisation of pregnancy and childbirth that informs even the critical sociology that purports to examine the issue. The risks that are faced in pregnancy and birth are not only the inherent dangers that midwives have worked with across time and space, but also those particular risks introduced by medicalisation itself. Medicalisation blinds us to those risks on the one hand, while it blinds us to the skills and knowledge that midwives and that birthing women themselves have on the other. The women and midwives researched in these articles show us that in pregnancy and birth, as in most of life, it is not just a matter of 'real risk' versus 'perceived risk' as Risk-theorists (too) often describe it. There is rather an intelligent balancing of risks, weighing of risks, contextualising of risks. What we see in this issue is a glimpse into the ways in which people intelligently, creatively, determinedly balance risks. P a g e | 2

On Line Opinion, 2009

2015

The Every Woman, Every Newborn supplement consists of nine papers in BioMed Central Pregnancy and Childbirth providing in depth analyses on the specific challenges to scaling up highimpact interventions and improving quality of care for mothers and newborns. We present programme-relevant analyses of the challenges and solutions to health system bottlenecks using data from 12 high-burden countries. The supplement takes forward the Every Newborn Action Plan (ENAP), endorsed at the World Health Assembly in 2014, which provides clear consensus on evidence, strategies and actions needed to end preventable newborn deaths and stillbirths (www.everynewborn.org). The goals, targets and objectives set out in the ENAP cannot be achieved without high quality, equitable coverage of intervention at and around the time of birth.

In this first paper of The Lancet's Stillbirths Series we explore the present status of stillbirths in the world—from global health policy to a survey of community perceptions in 135 countries. Our findings highlight the need for a strong call for action. In times of global focus on motherhood, the mother's own aspiration of a liveborn baby is not recognised on the world's health agenda. Millions of deaths are not counted; stillbirths are not in the Global Burden of Disease, nor in disability-adjusted life-years lost, and they are not part of the UN Millennium Development Goals. The grief of mothers might be aggravated by social stigma, blame, and marginalisation in regions where most deaths occur. Most stillborn babies are disposed of without any recognition or ritual, such as naming, funeral rites, or the mother holding or dressing the baby. Beliefs in the mother's sins and evil spirits as causes of stillbirth are rife, and stillbirth is widely believed to be a natural selection of babies never meant to live. Stillbirth prevention is closely linked with prevention of maternal and neonatal deaths. Knowledge of causes and feasible solutions for prevention is key to health professionals' priorities, to which this Stillbirths Series paper aims to contribute.