Thursday, July 30, 2015

When will stillbirth prevention be taken seriously

I work in a healthcare system where I am surrounded by talks of prenatal and postpartum care. It is a bit frustrating because I see so much focus on pregnant women but no one discusses the possibility of stillbirth. I want to shout to the whole world to stop being so blissfully ignorant. Stillbirth is a reality, us mother's of angel babies we are here. I feel as though so many people ignore stillbirth and what us mother's go through.



Today I seen an email regarding Fetal Infant Mortality Review Data in my county. It mentioned how the rate of stillbirth as plateaued or flattened yet the rate of sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS) has decreased significantly since the 1990's. 1 in 160 babies are born still however 1 in 2,000 babies die of SIDS. Why are the 1 in 2,000 deaths treated more seriously than the 1 in 160? 


In the 2014 NFIMR survey of FIMR programs, the majority of cases reviewed are for fetal deaths.

This triggered a feeling of anger in me. I am beyond livid at the fact that doctors and researchers and the whole healthcare community do not do more to prevent stillbirth. They will instead say it is easier to focus on preventing SIDS than it is to focus on preventing stillbirth because it is harder to find a cause for stillbirth. Well that is b**l***t! Even though 50% of all stillbirth have no known cause that does not mean that we can't focus on the causes that ARE KNOWN. 

To help prevent stillbirth we could treat every pregnancy as high risk, we could do more fetal monitoring...I would rather risk having too many ultrasounds than not knowing that my baby is in danger. We could also emphasize the importance of kick counts. Kick counts are casually mentioned by doctors with out an explanation of the importance or what to do if kicks slow or stop. Then there is this whole thing about the baby moving less after 35 weeks because there is less room which gives mother's this idea that it is normal if you baby is barely moving. 




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