This was inspired by all of the “I never knew I was pregnant” stories I’ve heard over the years. I’ve always wondered–just how high risk is it to never see a doctor when you are pregnant? I mean, I’m sure it would depend on things like is it a high risk pregnancy or is something wrong…but the average person who has no idea they’re pregnant and so doesn’t see an OB/GYN–what’s the probability that they’re going to be horribly screwing up their child by not being under a doctor’s care?
I had an extremely non-interventionist pregnancy. I had a scan and saw a midwife once, oh and a blood test to determine what blood type I was, and that was it until labour when I saw midwives again (and doctors right at the end becasue it was a bad labour). Doctors are not essential for the majority of pregnancies.
I don’t think there could possibly be a GQ answer to this one, though.
Pretty much everything doctors do pre-term is cautionary. They’re checking this and that and monitoring things “just in case” but rarely have to do any intervening.
I’d say the likelihood of a baby turning out okay is very high.
Generally speaking, female bodies know how to make a perfectly viable baby all by itself with no doctors at all. The medical community is mostly in place to deal with the ones that have any issues, on mom or babies part.
Making a baby has about a thousand little things that can go wrong, and a handful of them being presenty would result in a happy healthy baby. Whan a bunch of little things go wrong or one big thing, short of OB’s and NICU teams standing by, you get a dead mom, a dead baby, or both.
Major problems are rare but it happens. Uterine ruptures, placentia previa, meconium aspiration, major vaginal tears, odd presentation, many of these things can be dealt with by the delivery team, outside of the hospital, you end up with alot more funerals
I think part of this answer is related to the mother’s personal habits. Does she smoke? Drink? Use certain prescription medications (or illicit ones)? Any “yes” answers increase the possibility that baby would not be okay. It wouldn’t be a guarantee (one way or the other).
I find most of my prenatal care is simply monitoring–blood pressure, heart rate, weight, checking for UTIs, etc. The blood tests have been about checking hormone levels and screening for abnormalities. I wouldn’t consider any of it “medical intervention.” My ultrasounds have simply been about measuring the baby and monitoring his progress as well as checking the placenta and cervix. Again, all monitoring.
So, if this continues, I could have this baby without medical intervention (well, minus delivery, which may have to be a C-section due to my history of back surgeries). Monitoring, yes, but no intervention. Heck, I could probably have done it without the check ups, but no way would I want to.
A midwife who performed home births told me that 90% of pregnancies would go just fine without any medical intervention.
We’ve really gotten our heads screwed up over this whole reproduction thing. People were successfully having kids long before there were doctors to tell them what to do and in a time when the biggest worry wasn’t nutrition but avoiding starvation. Pregnancies don’t go wrong if you make some little tiny error… it’s just that 10% of them were destined to have problems from the beginning and we want to be sure we spot that 10% before someone dies.
This doesn’t take drugs, alcohol, physical abuse, etc. into account, but even people in those circumstances generally have mostly healthy babies.
My doctor told me it was something like 92% of the babies would be okay with no medical intervention. But that figure was lower for the mothers.
Well, with a little help from a male body at the beginning, too.
And dracoi, 90% is pretty high (and plenty high enough to ensure the continuity of the species), but were I expecting, I’d want the odds to be higher yet.
I wouldnt say perfectly, unless youre able to accept the mortality rate and life expectancies of someone from the 15th century.
I would think the percentage that would turn out just fine would be quite high, particularly if the mother knows not to do certain things like smoke, drink, drugs…and to make sure to eat well…things like that.
An interesting side question is out of the few? percent that have serious problems that are detected, what fraction of those can actually be fixed with a high degree with sucess ? Because knowing you have a problem without really being able to do much about it really isnt a plus in my mind.
Note that my opinion here should NOT be construed in anyway to NOT see a doctor. Hell, see one if you are even just thinking of going into the rugrat production business.
Sigh… we’re probably not in any disagreement.
If it was me or my wife, 90% odds wouldn’t be all that good and I would certainly want better survival rates than people had historically. We’d definitely be going to the doctor and taking reasonable precautions.
But, my brother’s wife decided to take cold showers during her pregnancy because she heard that being in a hot tub might be bad and extrapolated that hot showers might also be bad. My friend’s wife decided that her doctor’s recommendation to not eat tuna or sword fish more than once a week (because of mercury) actually meant that she should not eat anything from the ocean at all while pregnant or nursing.
I’m just so tired of this paranoia that makes people think their baby is in imminent danger from every little thing.
My friend’s mom apparently wouldn’t drive behind buses for fear of the fumes…doing something, I’m not quite sure what.
Yeah, the odds would have to be pretty good or humanity would have died out before the development of modern medicine. However there used to be significantly higher numbers of women who died while giving birth and more babies did not survive.
Yeah, but you have to figure at least 10% of child-bearing age women aren’t in great health to begin with, right? So if you start with a woman who is youngish, healthy weight, no known health problems or substance abuse, etc, I bet odds for things to turn out fine would be even higher.
As others have noted, our doctor did nothing but monitor during my wife’s pregnancy (excluding the actual delivery). Just eating well and staying active is more than enough, its not exactly like growing a baby is like assembling and engine or something where nuts and bolts need to be inserted and the wiring has to be hooked up.
Why would you “have to figure” that? Women of childbearing age are typically in excellent health; we never enjoy such good health as when we are young adults. I seriously doubt that anything like 10% of women are in such poor health as to present an abnormal risk in pregnancy.
We may not like it, but pregnancy is risky - much risker for us than for almost any other mammal species. We have real difficulty giving birth, and then give birth to young who are dramatically incompetent to provide even minimal care for themselves for far longer than any other species. Even simple technologies like the obstetric forceps made a huge difference to maternal mortaility rates- a difference that couldn’t have been made if there wasn’t a problem in the first place for the obstetric forceps to solve.
Most women will carry a child and give birth successfully with minimal medical or midwifery intervention, but a signficant minority will not - as we can see by looking at societies with minimal obstetric and midwifery services. And this is not because the minority are themselves ill, but because the rate of medical complications is higher for pregancy and childbirth than for almost any other human activity, apart from a few high-risk occupations mostly filled by men.
If we look back to the 16th, 17th, 18th c. we see records of many women dying in or around childbirth. You shrugged it off, and got married again.
Today, of course, for various reasons, many women try to produce children much later in life than they used to, with a correspondingly higher problem rate.
I believe the intent was “more people were unhealthy back when infant and maternal mortality was higher”. People in general are much more well nourished and have not had the debilitating childhood diseases that even “healthy” young people were much more likely to have in the 15th century (or even the early 20th.) How many young mothers now have had smallpox? Hookworms? Pellagra? Rickets? Polio?
ETA - you can probably trace some improvement in safe pregnancies just due to dental improvements and fluoridation.
If you’re looking at the general population of pregnant women, you have to consider that some will have STDs that need to be treated and could harm the baby. A fair amount of prenatal screening seems to be associated with that.
There are probably other non-STD health conditions the mother might have that could affect the baby, and it would be important to treat, such as gestational diabetes.
There’s also that Rh factor thing, which saves 1 in 10,000 babies.
It is probably also beneficial to identify people who need C-sections beforehand rather than performing them as emergency surgery.
Overall prenatal screening is one of the most cost-effective health interventions, so there is probably even more than we have listed here.
Of course, a lot of the tests and monitorings mentioned in this thread don’t actually require a doctor to be involved.