Birth Story

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.

Image by Petteri Sulonen

Everybody knows that obstetricians are one of the most-sued medical specialties, but nailing down the details on that truism can be difficult.

CRICO Strategies, an international firm that provides risk-management software to hospitals and insurances companies, last month released a "benchmarking report" on malpractice risks in obstetrics that helps fill out that sketchy picture.

The report looked at 800 obstetrics-related medical-liability suits filed between 2005 and 2009.

Families dealing with the death of a mother or child, a severely damaged infant, or some other effect of a childbirth gone awry most commonly charged "communication failures, judgment lapses, and faulty technique as the reasons behind their injuries and their malpractice cases," the report states.

Sixty-five percent of cases involved "high-severity injuries."

Across the board, about one in 1,000 births involves a "preventable adverse outcome," the report noted.

While those can occur throughout pregnancy and birth, most suits in the study concerned allegations that birth assistants had mismanaged labor and delivery, particularly the second stage of labor — the actual birth.

"Substandard clinical judgment" was the top complaint in the suits, accounting for 77 percent of claims. Most of the suits named an attending physician.

The most common reason for suing was "birth asphyxia," a potentially injurious lack of oxygen, which accounted for 27 percent of the suits, and the most common allegation was that of a "delay in treatment of fetal distress" (25 percent of claims involving small hospitals, 19 percent involving large ones).

Why is the Cesarean rate so precipitously on the rise, from 21 percent of all American births in 1996 to 33.2 percent in 2007? The journal Obstetrics and Gynecology has the results of a new study that examines that question.

The Yale University Schools of Medicine and Public Health in New Haven, Conn., reacted to a spike in C-sections during births at Yale-New Haven Hospital between 2000 and 2002 by setting to work gathering comprehensive data on the 32,443 births that occurred there between 2003 and 2009, even while the hospital's C-section rate ballooned from 26 percent to 36.5 percent.

Not surprisingly, the study found that actual birth complications remained steady, while subjective judgments about the births changed.

The new study, presented at the February meeting of the Society for Maternal-Fetal Medicine, looks at the decision-making on the part of individual doctors that drove that increase.

"In this study, we examined physician-documented indications for Cesarean delivery at a major urban academic medical center in Connecticut, a state with one of the largest rate increases in the nation, to determine which specific indications contributed to the increase in our Cesarean delivery rate over a seven-year period," the researchers wrote.

First-time mothers accounted for half of C-sections during the study.

Indications for Cesarean delivery included "nonreassuring fetal heart tracing," an interruption in dilation, more than one fetus, pre-eclampsia, an especially large baby (which begins to be a concern just shy of nine pounds), and the mother's expressed desire for a Cesarean, the study's authors reported.

Complications like breech presentations, an interruption in the baby's progress into the birth canal and cord prolapse  did not increase significantly over time, the study found.

Slow dilation and those unsatisfactory fetal heart rate reports displayed only slight increases over time but contributed to an outsize degree to the increase in C-sections, the study showed. Concern for the baby's well-being, based on fetal-heart monitoring, was the top indicator for a Cesarean section at Yale-New Haven Hospital during the period studied.

Maternal request, suspected macrosomia (a large baby), more than one fetus and pre-eclampsia also showed big annual increases as indications for Cesareans.

Interestingly, the C-section rate among patients of physicians in private practice was 33.2 percent. For "university patients," who received care from the hospital service's residents and faculty midwives, supervised by attending physicians, the rate was 25.6 percent. The rate for "high-risk" patients (whose care was provided by some of the same maternal-fetal specialists who supervised in the "university" cases) was 44.6 percent.

Fourteen of 105 obstetrics-gynecology practices surveyed by the South Florida Sun-Sentinel last month said they will not take on obese women as patients.

Representatives of six of the practices cited higher rates of complications in women who are obese, but other respondents said heavier women tax their exam tables and other equipment.

"People don't realize the risk we're taking by taking care of these patients," the paper quoted Dr. Albert Triana as saying. Dr. Triana is one of two physicians in a South Miami practice that turns away obese patients, according to the article. "There's more risk of something going wrong and more risk of getting sued."

Seventy-two million Americans — about one in three — meet the criteria for obesity, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, Ga.

"If I had that policy, I wouldn't have a practice. I'd lose half my patients," Dr. Maureen Whelihan, a West Palm Beach ob-gyn, told the Sun-Sentinel's Bob LaMendiola. "We never turn down anyone."

In a followup article in American Medical News, reporter Christine S. Moyer asked doctors to comment on the practice of turning patients away because of their weight.

"This is [primary care physicians'] patient population, and [they're] here to serve the patients," said one of them, Dr. David Bryman, a Phoenix family physician specializing in bariatric medicine, which deals with the causes, treatment and prevention of obesity. Dr. Bryman is president-elect of the American Society of Bariatric Physicians. "If that requires getting a little extra equipment to accommodate them, it's just part of the practice of medicine."

It isn't that childbirth is more inherently dangerous in countries where many women die in childbirth than in those where relatively few die. The women who survive, statistically speaking, are getting appropriate help from trained attendants.

"...The main complications that lead to death during pregnancy or childbirth are fairly common among all women, regardless of where they live," write the authors of an article titled "Are We Making Progress in Maternal Mortality?" in the May 26 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine.

Hemorrhage, which most often occurs right after birth, is the leading cause of pregnancy-related deaths globally, accounting for 35 percent of all deaths in childbirth, according to the World Health Organization. And in fact, hemorrhage was the second most common complication seen in pregnancies in the United States in 2000.

However, most U.S. women who suffered hemorrhage were treated quickly, and survived, say the article's authors, Anne Paxton and Tessa Wardlaw.

WHO identified the second most common cause of maternal death as hypertensive disorders — pre-eclampsia/eclampsia, for example. Again, these disorders are a common problem all over the world, but women with access to good medical care have a good chance of surviving them.

The countries that are most dangerous for pregnant women are those suffering through wars, or burdened with a large population with HIV/AIDS, the authors write.

In general, poor women die in childbirth more often than affluent ones, rural women more often than urban ones. These populations are more vulnerable because they often deliver their babies without the benefit of skilled birth attendants, and lack access to obstetrical services like surgery by Cesarean section.

Sub-Saharan Africa, with widespread political unrest and HIV/AIDS infection, "has the greatest burden of maternal mortality," even though most countries there are seeing "small but promising" decreases in pregnancy-related deaths.

Worldwide, there is considerable cause for hope, Paxton and Wardlaw write. Maternal mortality has decreased globally by more than one-third since 1990, according to United Nations estimates.

"Dramatic improvements in China and other Asian countries...are associated with economic improvement, decreasing fertility rates and strengthening of health systems...," the authors write.

"The overall rate of decline in global maternal mortality, 2.3 percent, is lower than the 5.5 percent MDG target but is heartening nonetheless," they write.

Image: "Pregnant Graffiti" by Petteri Sulonen

The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists came out once again this week cautioning against home births.

Hospitals and birthing centers are the safest place for labor and delivery, the speciality organization of obstetricians stated in a committee opinion on Thursday.

A prior Cesarean delivery "is an absolute contraindication to planning a home birth due to the risks, including uterine rupture," the statement said. Twins, breech babies and pregnancies that have gone beond 42 weeks are not good candidates either — too risky for the babies, ACOG said.

"Home births don't always go well, and the risk is higher if they are attended by inadequately trained attendants or in poorly selected patients with serious high-risk medical conditions such as hypertension, breech presentation, or prior Cesarean deliveries," said Richard N. Waldman MD, ACOG's president.

This is the latest in a long line of statements the group has made cautioning against the less than 1 percent of  American births that take place at home.

Even so, ACOG does want women to know that if they decide to deliver their babies at home, they should get the "standard components of prenatal care, including Group B strep screening and treatment, genetic screening, and HIV screening."

And, they should work with a birth attendant who is part of "an integrated and regulated health system, have ready access to consultation, and have a plan for safe and quick transportation to a nearby hospital in the event of an emergency," the statement said.

Do we really need medical students learning about birth from mute robots? Really?

Every pregnancy begins with a 3 percent chance that the resulting baby will have birth defects, and that is before individual genetic and environmental histories come into play. Some birth defects cannot be prevented or fixed. Medicine cannot work miracles.

That's the message in "The perils of the imperfect expectation of the perfect baby," an article in this month's American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology. Prospective parents need to understand that "perfection in pregnancy is not attainable now or even in the foreseeable future," according to the article's authors.

Doctors too can get drawn into "expecting more from medicine than its limited diagnostic and therapeutic capacities justify," say the article's authors, led by Frank A. Chervenak MD. Not only that, but "many pregnant patients are optimistic about the advances in medicine and are confident that their physicians will solve all problems that could occur with their pregnancy."

In fact, everyone needs to get in touch with "the inherent errors of human reproduction, the highly variable clinical outcomes of these errors, the limited capacity of medicine to detect these errors, and the even more limited capacity to correct them," the article states.

The expectation that a perfect baby can eventually be taken away from every pregnancy "assumes powers of medicine to control human reproduction that medicine does not possess," the article states.

In the early 17th century, before the scientific method began its ascendancy in the Western world, the Englishman William Harvey described how the blood circulates through the human body, solving a mystery that had stumped scientists for centuries.

Some other scientists — Galen, the ancient Greek; Ibn al-Nafis, who worked in Egypt in the 13th century; and Michael Servetus, a 16th-century Spaniard — had got a chunk of the story right.

William Harvey

Only Harvey, who assiduously tested his theories on living animals, figured out that blood circulates throughout the entire body.

He published his thesis in 1628, as On the Motion of the Heart and Blood in Animals. His discovery is considered one of the most important achievements in medical history.

Harvey introduced the "experimental and observational approach" to scientific inquiry, the British medical historian P.M. Dunn writes in an article for the Archives of Disease in Childhood.

In addition to his revolutionary work on blood, Harvey also advanced our understanding of human reproduction. His practice extended to obstetrics, and he was interested in and knowledgeable about birth.

Harvey's 1651 book On the Generation of Animals, published with the stunning essay "On Parturition," debunked the idea that embryos were fully formed at conception, and advanced the theory of epigenesis, which held correctly that a chick, for example, grew all its various parts from a single cell.

Harvey also addressed labor, advising birth attendants to let nature take its course rather than to intervene unnecessarily. Harvey's tract was the first original work on obstetrics written by an Englishman. Aside from these famous works, the rest of his prodigious writing has been lost.

What remains is "truly remarkable when judged against the ignorance of the times and the prevalent reliance on ancient authority," Dunn writes of Harvey.

A fight worth watching is shaping up in the New York State Legislature, where a bill that would ease restrictions on the practice of midwifery has attracted opposition from the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, the new political arm of the 59-year-old organization that represents physicians who specialize in caring for women.

The bill, dubbed the Midwifery Modernization Act by its supporters, would give midwives the right to attend pregnant women without first obtaining a written practice agreement from a medical doctor.

On June 17, ACOG held a press conference in Albany to warn that the bill could compromise the safety of mothers and babies by exposing them to the risk of delivering without medical backup in the event of an emergency.

Midwives say that they sometimes have a hard time finding a doctor, say, in rural areas, willing and able provide a written practice agreement. And, they say, the problem is not confined to the boondocks.

After St. Vincent's Hospital in New York City closed last April, seven midwives who attend home births found themselves without a practice agreement, according to a story in the New York Times. St. Vincent's, a Catholic hospital, reportedly was uncommonly sympathetic to home births.

New York has as many as 900 midwives, more than any other state, according to Laura Sheperis, president of the New York Association of Licensed Midwives, in a separate story. Fifteen states so far do not require written practice agreements, which Sheperis has characterized as a "cumbersome and unnecessary barrier to health care and provider choice."

The bill would not prohibit doctors and midwives from creating written practice agreements; it would remove the requirement for them.

ACOG came out swinging against home births (along with the American Medical Association) in 2008 in response to "The Business of Being Born," a film that featured the home birth experience of actress/former talk-show host Ricki Lake.

"...Monitoring of both the woman and the fetus during labor and delivery in a hospital or accredited birthing center is essential because complications can arise with little or no warning even among women with low-risk pregnancies," ACOG stated in 2008.

Obstetricians deliver about 70 percent of American babies, while midwives, mostly nurse-midwives, handled roughly 8 percent of births in 2004. Family physicians attend about 20 percent of American births.

"Pregnant Graffiti" by Petteri Sulonen