Skip to main content icon/video/no-internet
icon backReturn to Entries

Prenatal Care

Prenatal care, also called antenatal care, refers to medical treatment of pregnant women. Though pregnancy is a normal female physiological process, rather than an illness or disease, it still introduces physical risks to the mother and the fetus; therefore, prenatal care's primary emphasis is on reducing and/or eliminating known threats to maternal and infant health.

Early documented accounts of formal medical attention to pregnant women date back to the 1st century, when the Greek physician Soranus of Ephesus recommended gentle care of pregnant women and abstinence from sexual intercourse during pregnancy. In medieval Europe, physicians reportedly offered herbal remedies for physical discomfort in pregnancy.

Early Formal Prenatal Care Programs

In early-20th-century Western Europe, systematic medical programs to reduce maternal mortality began emerging and involved caring for childbearing women throughout pregnancy and childbirth. Treating primarily poor, urban-dwelling mothers, formally educated nurses with obstetric training—in today's terms, nurse-midwives—conducted repeated home visits to check on expectant mothers’ weight and blood pressure and to measure the mothers’ abdomens for fetal growth and position.

In countries such as Denmark and Great Britain, prenatal nurse visitation also incorporated educating mothers on safe hygiene in childbirth. In programs such as these, prenatal care was typically coupled with childbirth assistance provided by a trained nurse or midwife. In 1930, a larger-scale, international effort to reduce maternal mortality began officially when the League of Nations’ Health Section identified maternal mortality as a global concern. Though not a league member at that time, the United States supported a number of domestic prenatal and childbirth assistance programs for low-income mothers. For example, data from programs treating poor, rural-dwelling women in Kentucky showed that maternal mortality rates dropped to about one-tenth of typical maternal death rates in the early-20th-century United States.

By the 1950s, researchers had learned that the chief causes of maternal mortality—bacterial infection, uncontrolled bleeding, and obstructed labor—were most effectively addressed with the intervention of a skilled attendant in childbirth. Thus, prenatal medicine began shifting away from focusing on maternal survival and more toward fetal development and health. The discovery of ultrasound imaging in the 1940s and 1950s and its growing use in obstetric medicine by the 1960s marked another critical point in the progressive and ongoing decoupling of maternal and fetal health.

Scientific Studies and Prenatal Care Today

The separation of maternal and fetal health has led to research on two major issues in prenatal care: first, how the number of prenatal visits relates to maternal and infant health, and second, what the benefits of specific prenatal procedures may be. On the first matter—the relationship between prenatal visits and maternal/infant health—having from 12 to 14 prenatal visits was an accepted tradition until the 1970s, when U.S. researchers reported that mothers who attended more prenatal visits had fewer premature and low-birth-weight babies than mothers who had fewer visits. Those studies were flawed because they failed to take into account that women attending more prenatal visits were also more often white and socially advantaged compared with women who attended fewer visits.

Controlling for sociodemographic factors, a British medical team published a landmark study in 1985 indicating that reducing the number of prenatal visits from the traditional 13 to eight for first-time mothers, and fewer for multiparous mothers, did not adversely affect mothers or infants. This work triggered an accumulation of research in the United States and abroad supporting reduced visit schedules as safe and effective. In 1998, the U.S. National Institutes of Health recommended 8 to 11 “focused” visits for first-time mothers (seven for women with prior children), rather than the traditional 13 to 14 visits. Global health organizations also have reinforced a reduced visit schedule; for example, the World Health Organization recommended in 2006 four medical checks as a necessary minimum. In the United States today, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists’ most recent published guidelines maintain the 13–14-visit schedule, but another widely used treatment guideline in the United States recommends up to 11 but no fewer than eight visits.

...

  • Loading...
locked icon

Sign in to access this content

Get a 30 day FREE TRIAL

  • Watch videos from a variety of sources bringing classroom topics to life
  • Read modern, diverse business cases
  • Explore hundreds of books and reference titles

Read next

More like this

Sage Recommends

We found other relevant content for you on other Sage platforms.

close

Have you created a personal profile? Login or create a profile so that you can save clips, playlists and searches

close
close
close Signed In to profile You are signed in as:
close
Logged in Institution Institution