How great would it be to be able to tell in advance whether a particular birth would go smoothly or need intervention!
A French team of physicians reported this week at the annual meeting of the Radiological Society of North America that it has developed a new computer model that uses magnetic resonance imaging to predict whether a birth will go smoothly or have problems.
Olivier Ami MD told a session of the RSNA meeting in Chicago that his team applied the new software, called Predibirth, to 24 MR images of pregnant women, and created a three-dimensional model of the woman's pelvis and the fetus. Using these images, Predibirth calculated the likelihood that the babies could find their way out of their mothers' bodies without assistance.
Of the 24 women studied, 13 delivered normally. Predibirth had predicted normal births for all of these women. Predibirth had tagged three women who opted for elective Cesarean sections as being at risk for dystocia.
Of five women who had emergency C-sections, Predibirth had predicted three might have problems — all three involved instructed labor. However, Predibirth had given thumbs up to two of the mothers, whose problems involved heart arrhythmia.
Predibirth had declared "mildly favorable" three additional moms who wound up resorting to vacuum extraction during birth.
Not perfect, but not bad.
"With this virtual childbirth software, the majority of C-sections could be planned rather than emergency, and difficult instrumental extractions might disappear in the near future," Dr. Ami told his audience in Chicago.
Dr. Ami M.D. is an obstetrician in the radiology department at Antoine Béclère Hospital, Université Paris Sud, France.
If you think this is dangerous, try giving birth in poor countries without a midwife, hospital or medicine. This flashmob is one of a series happening in Paris, Berlin, Utrecht and across Canada to highlight the scandal that millions of women in poor countries and around the world aren't getting the healthcare they need for a safe and healthy pregnancy.
(And just to put your minds a rest - the dancing expectant mums in this video aren't pregnant, they were professional dancers wearing pregnancy suits!)
Carla Bruni-Sarkozy, the first lady of France, reportedly is pregnant.
Carla Bruni-Sarkozy
The Sarkozys have not confirmed the story, but it moved beyond rumor this week when the president's 82-year-old father, Pal, told the German newspaper Bild, "I'm glad to be having a grandchild."
The Italian-born Bruni-Sarkozy, 43, a former model and entertainer, has one child from a previous relationship. Her husband, French President Nicolas Sarkozy, 56, has three children from two previous marriages. The couple married in 2008.
The baby boom doesn't stop in the Elysee Palace. With an average of 2.01 children, the French have one of the highest fertility rates in Europe. The population hit 65 million last year, when 828,000 babies were born in France.
This old video of a photo opportunity featuring the 18-month-old Prince William of Great Britain, who was married today with a reported two billion people watching, gives an idea of what his life has been like from the beginning.
Kate Middleton, the woman of the hour, will marry Great Britain's Prince William tomorrow in a spectacular wedding that has that portion of the world that cares about these things in a perfect tizzy.
Kate Middleton
Kate was born at Royal Berkshire Hospital in Reading, Berkshire, England, on Jan. 9, 1982. Her father, Michael, was a pilot and her mother, Carole, was a flight attendant when they met.
The Middletons went on to make a fortune with their own mail-order party-goods company, and that allowed them to send Kate and her two siblings to the kind of schools that have made it possible to imagine Catherine, as she is now officially called, handling the role of the future Queen of England.
The romance between Prince William and Kate, a commoner, is a charming story of two college students whose friendship grew over a decade into love.
But their marriage may say more about lessons learned inside Buckingham Palace than about any real freedom members of the royal family have gained in choosing whom to marry.
In 1772, King George III, disgusted with what he deemed the inappropriate marriages two of his brothers had made to commoners, insisted that Parliament pass the Royal Marriages Act, a complicated tangle of regulations that boil down to the fact that the reigning monarch must approve royals' prospective mates.
It was the ultimate meddling in children's lives, and it was the law.
It still is. Queen Elizabeth gave her consent to William and Catherine's marriage on Feb. 9.
He was the first male of the British royal family to be born in a hospital. Prince Charles also broke with tradition by attending the birth.
Prince William and his parents leave the hospital
Prince Charles and his first wife, Princess Diana, William's mother, arrived at the hospital very early on the morning of the day William was born.
George Pinker MD, the royal gynecologist, attended Diana. She had also been coached by Betty Parsons, a nurse and natural-birth advocate who had helped Queen Elizabeth with a couple of her births.
Many accounts present the birth as "natural" and drug-free, while at least one insider book holds that the princess had an epidural during her 16-hour labor.
William was born at 9:03 p.m., and weighed 7 lb. 2 oz. A 41-gun salute was fired off in his honor. Princess Diana was back home the next day.
Prince Charles, always restrained, was clearly thrilled. He wrote friends, "I can't tell you how excited and proud I am," adding that he found the newborn William "surprisingly appetising."
Zillions of words have been written about the fascinating and ultimately tragic Princess Diana, who was separated from Prince Charles in 1992, and divorced in 1996. She died in a horrific automobile accident in 1997.
Diana was known for her beauty and charisma, and for her unbridled affection for her children. Her foibles were visible even to a mostly adoring public, but she had warmth as well as sparkle.
In 2001, former U.S. President Bill Clinton said this about her:
"In 1987, when so many still believed that AIDS could be contracted through casual contact, Princess Diana sat on the sickbed of a man with AIDS and held his hand. She showed the world that people with AIDS deserve no isolation, but compassion and kindness. It helped change world opinion, and gave hope to people with AIDS with an outcome of saved lives of people at risk."
The way the British royal family handles special occasions is interesting, to me anyway, because everything they do has to be examined in advance through history, tradition and protocol. Then the next day, many, many other people run out and do as close to the same thing as they possibly can.
Prince Charles with then-Princess Elizabeth
Birth is no different.
The last few generations of the royal family have provided boatloads of drama that have kept the tabloids chattering and the rest of us agog — romance, opulence, star-crossed lovers, betrayal, tragedy, untimely death.
This week, in the runup to the wedding of Prince William and Catherine Middleton, Birth Story is going to look at a few royal births.
We begin with Prince Charles, William's father, born at Buckingham Palace on Nov. 14, 1948, to then-Crown Princess Elizabeth, 22, and her husband, Prince Philip.
Philip famously played squash with a friend in another part of the palace during his son's birth. To be fair, in 1948 most fathers were at best pacing in hospital waiting rooms during their children's births. And, Philip did bring Elizabeth carnations and Champagne afterwards.
Just two weeks after Charles's birth, in a letter recently sold at auction, Elizabeth wrote a cousin, a bridesmaid at her 1947 wedding,"The baby is very sweet, and Philip and I are enormously proud of him. I still find it hard to believe that I really have a baby of my own!"
Queen Elizabeth II celebrated her 85th birthday today with a commemoration that mingled an important tradition of the Easter season in Great Britain with the real birthday of the oldest British monarch ever to occupy the throne.
Today, with just a week and a day to go until the wedding of the queen’s grandson Prince William to Catherine Middleton, the monarch attended Maundy Thursday service at Westminster Abbey on her birthday.
She gave “Maundy money,” specially minted silver coins, to 85 men and 85 women, the number representing the years of her life. The recipients were retirees chosen for their “tireless work for the Church and their communities,” according to an article in The Telegraph.
The custom, which draws from the explicit example of humility and service Jesus gave his apostles by washing their feet at the Last Supper, is hundreds of years old in England. It replaced an earlier practice in which the king would wash the feet of the poor on Maundy, or Holy, Thursday.
However, British monarchs had drifted away from distributing Maundy money personally, leaving the task to the clergy, until George V, Elizabeth’s grandfather, revived the tradition in 1932, according to an article that year in Time magazine.
Queen Elizabeth ascended to the throne when she was 25, and has ruled for 59 years. In 2007, she passed “mad” King George III, who died in 1820 at the age of 82, to become the oldest British monarch. Only Queen Victoria has had a longer reign.
The queen celebrates her birthday officially in June.
The World Health Organization has published a list of 30 medicines that can make the difference between life and death for mothers and children younger than 5 years of age.
This list of "priority medicines" was developed by the WHO, the United Nations Population Fund and UNICEF. It is the first such list, the sine qua non for mothers and children regardless of where they are , according to an editorial in the Lancet. (This list should not be confused with WHO's Model List of Essential Medicines.)
"An estimated 8.1 million children under the age of five die every year and an estimated 1,000 women — most of them in developing countries — die every day due to complications during pregnancy or childbirth," states the introduction to the list.
The new publication is something of a "wish list," the Lancet notes, in that five of the medicines to protect young children have not yet been developed.
These are the generic treatments on the list that address conditions that threaten the lives of mothers:
* For post-partum hemorrhage — oxytocin and sodium chloride
* For pre-eclampsia and eclampsia — calcium gluconate injection (for treatment of magnesium toxicity), magnesium sulfate
* For puerperal infection — ampicillin, metronidasole, gentamicin, misoprostol
* For sexually transmitted diseases — azithromycin for chlamydia, cefixime and, for syphillis, benzathine benzylpenicillin
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