Poverty, cuts Kill babies

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On average, in Britain this year, one in every fifteen births is going to result in a dead or handicapped baby.

Around 11,000 babies will be stillborn or will die in the first few weeks after birth and around 30,000 will face life suffering from some form of congenital disability.

The Spastic Society, in a report sent to Patrick Jenkin last week, maintain that over 4,000 of the deaths will be due to the lack of adequate antenatal care facilities, particularly intensive-care units.

Incubators

They point out that the DHSS's own recommendations require the provision of 480 incubators although only 129 are available.

They also claim that over a third of the handicaps could be prevented given adequate community-health programmes.

Another report, sponsored by the Government, also published last week attacks the Spastic Society's call for improved maternity provisions.

They state that poverty is the main cause for this country's high infant mortality and handicap rate lone of the worst in Europe).

The National Perinatal Epidemiology : Unit, based at Churchill Hospital in Oxford, believe there is little point in investing vast amounts of money in ante-natal care, because by then it is already too late.

There is some truth in both arguments.

Maternity care facilities are not equally distributed and tend to be most lacking in the areas where they are most needed.

More than half of the deaths and handicaps are due to Hypoxia and low birth weight which tend to predominate in the poorer areas of the country.

Results from Manchester Intensive Care Unit support the Spastic Society's call for improved provisions. Between 15-20% of babies born there are of low body weight and they have an 87% survival rate amongst these.

However, intensive care units can only treat the effects of Hypoxia, they cannot treat the cause; and this is where the NPEU report is valid.

Over the past ten years the number of midwives has been halved mostly due to the policy of centring maternity care and delivery in the hospital as opposed to the home.

There are sound arguments in favour of this policy provided that there are adequate back-up ammunity rontirror and faril ities. But this has not been the case.

The policy of hospital deliveries has been accompanied by the reduction of the most important community asset-the visiting mid-wife.

In the poorer areas, on average, a third of expectant mothers don't attend pre-natal clinic soon enough or often enough, although, often they can hardly be blamed, with over-crowded waiting rooms, impersonal treatment, and long journeys.

Hospitals and clinics are closed, so are nurseries and schools, wages are restricted and jobs axed.

The people most crushed, vulnerable and desperate are denounced by the wealthy as 'scroungers' This is the light in which we must view the bureaucratic betrayals of last winter's low pay battles and the hypocritical bleatings of a Labour opposition that nicklv caeme tn have LJOE uIknIy JU • forgotten the name of Hounslow Hospital!

PHOTO: John Smith, IFL