The Global Burden of Stillbirth

Photo by Vladimer Shioshvili via Flickr

As a teenager in the late 1980s, I was a huge fan of the model Christy Turlington Burns.  As I’ve blogged about before, in 2011 there’s much more to admire about her than her enduring beauty.  Over the weekend, Turlington Burns and others representing her advocacy organization, Every Mother Counts, ran the ING New York City Marathon to, in her words, “make the vital connection for people that so many pregnant women live far from health services around the world and that distance does make a difference [in the prevention of maternal mortality]. Simply put, we want to run so that others don’t have to…”

Just as distance makes a difference in the prevention of maternal mortality, it also makes a difference in the prevention of stillbirth.[1] In the introduction to a special series of articles that ran in The Lancet in April of this year, Zoe Mullan and Richard Horton note that 98% of the estimated 2.64 million stillbirths each year, “occur in low-income and middle-income countries, and in places such as south Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, at least half of them take place during labour or birth.”  In addition to reducing maternal and newborn mortality rates, then, closing the literal and figurative distance between pregnant women and childbirth care would prevent many stillbirths from occurring.

In a pair of important articles - Stillbirths: What Difference Can We Make and At What Cost? and Stillbirths: How Can Health Systems Deliver for Mothers and Babies — The Lancet’s Stillbirths Series Steering Committee delves into the prevention question in detail.  The Steering Committee systematically assessed 35 potential interventions to determine (1) whether they were effective at reducing the stillbirth rate and (2) “whether they are affordable and implementable in low-income and middle-income countries.”   The following ten interventions passed the Committee’s test and were strongly recommended for implementation: “periconceptional folic acid fortification, insecticide-treated bednets or intermittent preventive treatment for malaria prevention, syphilis detection and treatment, detection and management of hypertensive disease of pregnancy, detection and management of diabetes of pregnancy, detection and management of fetal growth restriction, routine induction to prevent post-term pregnancies, skilled care at birth, basic emergency obstetric care, and comprehensive emergency obstetric care.”  Of these, the Committee recommended that skilled care at birth and emergency obstetric care take priority, both because they were the most effective at reducing the number of stillbirths and because they additionally benefit women and newborn babies.

The Stillbirths Series Committee estimated that “[i]n 68 countries accounting for 92% of the worldwide burden of stillbirths in 2008, universal coverage of care (99%) with intervention packages in 2015 could save up to 1.1 million (45%) third-trimester stillbirths, 201,000 (54%) maternal deaths, and 1.4 million (43%) neonatal deaths at an additional cost of US $2.32 per person, which is well below the WHO and World Bank criteria for cost-effectiveness.”  While it seems only fair to consider this “triple return for every dollar invested” in determining funding priorities, the tragedy of stillbirth does not always “count.”

The World Health Organization’s Global Burden of Disease analysis, for example, which aims to “provide[] a comprehensive and comparable assessment of mortality and loss of health due to diseases, injuries and risk factors for all regions of the world[,]” does not factor in stillbirths.  The WHO explains on its website that “[p]erinatal mortality, defined as number of stillbirths and deaths in the first week of life per 1,000 live births, is a useful additional indicator, and work is ongoing to improve estimates of stillbirth rates, a major component of perinatal mortality.”  The United Nations’ Millennium Development Goals similarly fail to include reducing the rate of stillbirths.  This should change.  In the words of Mullan and Horton in The Lancet, “stillbirths matter to people” and “stillbirth prevention should be placed as highly on global and national health agendas as prevention of maternal and neonatal deaths.”

NIH Panel Recommends Medico-Legal Reform to Reduce Elective Repeat Cesarean Delivery Rate

Photo by Tambako the Jaguar via Flickr

In December 2009, an Arizona woman made the news when, in her ninth month of pregnancy, she left her husband and three sons behind and traveled to Phoenix, six hours away from her home, to await the birth of her fourth child.  She took these drastic measures because she wanted to give birth vaginally but her local hospital did not allow women who have had a cesarean section to attempt a vaginal delivery.

Last week, the NIH held a consensus development conference on vaginal birth after cesarean (”VBAC”) to evaluate, among other things, the sharp increase in elective repeat cesarean deliveries in the United States and the medical and non-medical factors that have caused it.  The panel convened by the NIH found that both a trial of labor in women who have had a prior cesarean and an elective repeat cesarean delivery have “important risks and benefits” that “differ for the woman and her fetus.”  A trial of labor is associated with a statistically significant increase in risk of uterine rupture and in risk of perinatal death.  Elective repeat cesarean delivery, on the other hand, is associated with a statistically significant increase in risk of maternal death.  Moreover, as the number of prior cesareans goes up, the risk of serious harm to both mother and baby does too, which is of particular concern to women who hope to have large families.  As the panel notes, these facts and figures pose “a profound ethical dilemma for the woman as well as her caregivers, because benefit for the woman may come at the price of increased risk for the fetus and vice versa.”

The panel concluded that for certain women — those with a “prior low transverse uterine incision” — a trial of labor is a reasonable choice, albeit one that it increasingly constrained by difficulty accessing clinicians and facilities able and willing to offer it. Among the non-medical barriers to VBAC is a recommendation made by the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists and the American Society of Anesthesiologists that women with a prior cesarean not be permitted to attempt a vaginal delivery unless the hospital has “immediately available” surgical and anesthesia personnel.  The panel concluded that this recommendation should be reassessed in light of “other obstetrical complications of comparable risk, risk stratification, and in light of limited physician and nursing resources.”

The panel also found that “medico-legal considerations add to, as well as exacerbate” barriers to VBAC.  Midwife Amy Romano, who writes the Science & Sensibility blog for Lamaze International, explains that because “lawsuits focus entirely on the counseling around [uterine] rupture rates, and doctors are sued if that counseling isn’t done or documented effectively, then the doctor has a financial incentive to focus on rupture likelihood[.]“  This steers women toward elective repeat cesarean delivery and exacerbates the already formidable liability barrier to VBAC.  The panel predicted that “caps on noneconomic damages and reductions in physician malpractice premiums would result in fewer cesarean deliveries” and recommended that these and other interventions to reduce the liability barrier be developed, implemented, and evaluated to determine their efficacy.

Maternity Care and Health Care Reform

In the last few weeks, health reform has been receiving more public attention than it had before, much of which can be attributed to President Obama’s efforts to unify Congress in passing a bill.  For consumers, the politics of reform have helped to blur the defining components of each reform bill, leaving them unsure of what their health care insurance will or will not cover (let alone how they will pay for it) if reform is passed.  This is a real frightening thought considering that consumers will be the ones directly affected by whatever Congress decides.  In most American family units, the women make the majority of health care decisions for the rest of the family; women also have a lot at stake when it comes to their own health care access.  For these reasons, it is essential for women to understand and know what their legislators are planning for their health.

One of the areas of women’s health care that certainly needs to be reformed is maternity care.  Currently, women in the individual market can be denied health coverage if they seek coverage after becoming pregnant.  And that’s not the only  pregnancy related preexisting condition out there - if you’ve had a C-section before, you could be charged far greater premiums or even denied health coverage altogether.  It may seem that women who are uninsured are the only ones that would have to deal with such scenarios; however, women with insurance from the individual market or employer-based insurance face similar challenges in accessing care.  Read this story about a woman who had coverage through a private insurer and still had to pay $22,000 for having a baby.

Among the different types of private insurance that women have (or can have), there are major discrepancies with regard to maternal health coverage.  You are most likely best-off if you have employer-based insurance; best being a relative term.  Protection from discrimination in employer-based coverage exists through the Pregnancy Discrimination Act of 1978, which made any pregnancy-based discrimination unlawful.  However, the individual market is another story altogether.  The Pregnancy Discrimination Act and a number of other consumer safeguard regulations do not apply to the individual market.  States allow for insurance companies in the individual market to calculate premiums based on categories like gender, age, and pregnancy status.

The issue of access to maternity care for uninsured women, however,  is surely the case of the worst-off.  The obvious translation here is poor prenatal care, which is a vital aspect of not only the mother’s health but the child’s as well.  Considering the fact that our country has one of the highest infant mortality rates among developed nations, the need for reform to address maternity care for the uninsured is a serious one.  While Medicaid is able to assist in covering some of these uninsured women, a large overhaul of the maternity health care services of public programs like Medicaid should be requisite within national health care reform.

Congressional health reform proposals have not yet fully revealed what they will do to ameliorate the maternity health challenges that women face in our country.  However, we do know that certain systems have historically served women’s maternity health care needs better than others.  At this point in the national health care reform stage, women should be particularly concerned with the type of reform that Congress will pass.

Any health reform or insurance plan legislation which fails to provide access to care to ensure healthy pregnancies should be seen as strongly suspect-as this fundamental disregard for the basic needs of women (and children), dire in itself, would surely be a harbinger for a further disregard of women’s rights going forward.