With engaging prose and scientific rigor, Lantos and Lauderdale upend conventional wisdom about what is right—and wrong—with modern maternity care, and point us compellingly toward a new paradigm for evaluating and advancing the health of pregnant women and the children they bear.
Anne Drapkin Lyerly, MD, Associate Professor of Social Medicine, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; author of A Good Birth
This is a fascinating, accessible, and insightful analysis of a revolution in reproduction over the last half-century. Lantos and Lauderdale provocatively challenge conventional ways of thinking about prenatal care, and rates of preterm birth and caesarean section. They provide a radical new look at perinatal health, and at the costs and the benefits of reproductive freedom.
Dominic Wilkinson, MD, Neonatologist, Director of Medical Ethics, University of Oxford; author of Death or Disability?
Lantos and Lauderdale provide a thoughtful, comprehensive, and data-driven analysis of modern obstetric care. They conclude, paradoxically, that better access to high-quality perinatal care has increased preterm birth while decreasing infant mortality. They argue that the challenge for clinicians and patients alike is to embrace the more technological and medicalized obstetric interventions while eliminating those early inductions and caesarian sections that are not medically indicated.
Alan R. Fleischman, MD, Professor of Clinical Pediatrics and Professor of Clinical Epidemiology and Population Health, Albert Einstein College of Medicine; former Medical Director, March of Dimes Foundation
Preterm Babies provides a fascinating look at the changing face of childbirth in this country and presents premature birth as a deeply personal, as well as a medical and political, issue.
Health Affairs
