Improving Maternity Care: A Mother and Child Reunion
When a woman is expecting a child, our hope for her is a safe birth, a healthy baby, and, for those keeping the child, an easy transition to motherhood. This is a helpful framework for designing Maternity care policies, except we must apply it to a large and diverse population of childbearing women. Must we approach Maternity care prioritizing either women or babies.
Care practices that optimize the mother’s physical and emotional health are always good for babies. Excellent education and support of expectant parents can help foster confidence and resilience for new mothers to draw upon. And systems of care can protect and promote the healthy biological processes of mother-infant attachment.
Important Things To Know About Maternity
The simple act of placing the newborn skin-to-skin with the mother for the hour after birth resulted in more affectionate behavior by the mothers toward their infants 1-2 days later. This included more time holding their infants and more affectionate touch during breastfeeding. A systematic review of studies of early skin-to-skin contact showed that differences in some Maternity attachment behaviors persisted as long as one year after the contact occurred.
Physical health outcomes are no better. Maternal mortality and serious morbidity are on the rise and one-third of women begin motherhood recovering from major abdominal surgery. We are moving away from Healthy People goals for preterm birth, low birth weight, cerebral palsy and mental retardation and have stagnated far below goal rates for other measures including rates of stillbirth and newborn death.
Maternity care systems built on midwife-led primary care yield better health outcomes for women and infants, and offer cost savings to boot. This is the model that nearly every other industrialized country is moving toward – if they’re not already there. The midwifery model of care is holistic and family-centered, emphasizes education and empowerment, and recognizes that childbirth produces both a baby and a mother.
