Science / Medicine : Prenatal Care Inadequate?

All pregnant women, especially blacks, can improve their chances of having a healthy baby by receiving adequate prenatal care, according to a study last week in the New England Journal of Medicine.

The study focused on 31,000 black and white women of comparable socioeconomic status who delivered babies at Kaiser-Permanente hospitals in California in 1978. Despite equal opportunities provided by Kaiser for the mothers to obtain prenatal care, “blacks used prepaid medical services less extensively than did whites, yet apparently benefited more from such care,” according to the study.

Authors Jann L. Murray and Merton Bernfield at the Stanford School of Medicine estimated that if all mothers in the study had received adequate prenatal care and that the care were successful in reducing low birth weight babies, Kaiser would have saved $8 million during one year alone in the cost of providing neonatal intensive care and rehospitalization for the sickly infants.