Why is the currently almost exclusive focus on perinatal mortality when assessing "safety" of childbirth problematic? Listen to this insightful commentary by Elselijn Kingma at the HRiC conference last year: "What is rarely mentioned is the overwhelming evidence that home births are safer for mothers; not a little bit safer but massively so. Now, that tells us something about the values in our society. Those facts are there but how we interpret those facts tells us something about how we value saving very occasionally one life of a child versus inflicting lots of harms on other people, namely the mothers of these children. It is one thing for mothers to routinely make their choice to put themselves at risk for their children and that is always and ever an act of extreme altruism. But from a policy level, a society has a duty to value all its citizens and all its humans equally. And from that point of view, it is not at all obvious that we should always be so focused on perinatal mortality." Elselijn Kingma, Professor of Philosophy and Medical Ethics, UK and the Netherlands
Posted on: Mon, 10 Jun 2013 18:41:43 +0000
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