High-Risk Pregnancy

NATURE, in her lavish efforts to populate the earth, has devised such a miraculous process that despite many obstacles, most pregnancies, at least when measured in terms of perinatal mortality, have a successful outcome. This in itself lulls the public, the profession and the patient into a false sense of security and apathy that constitutes one of the most important barriers to progress.In the foreword to the recent British Perinatal Mortality Survey, Nixon writes as follows1:The perinatal death rate is also an index of the number of near deaths which may have occurred and present with defects . . .