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Maternal death or maternal mortality is defined in slightly different ways by several different health organizations. The World Health Organization (WHO) defines maternal death as the death of a pregnant mother due to complications related to pregnancy, underlying conditions worsened by the pregnancy or management of these conditions.
The death of a mother during pregnancy, childbirth or immediately afterwards is a tragic event. The chances of a child surviving such an extreme birth are compromised. [1] In literature, the death of a new mother is a powerful device: it removes one character and places the surviving child into an often hostile environment which has to be overcome.
A person born in these circumstances is called a posthumous child or a posthumously born person. Most instances of posthumous birth involve the birth of a child after the death of its father, but the term is also applied to infants delivered shortly after the death of the mother, usually by caesarean section. [2]
A national study examined the death rates from pregnancy in white and black women. The study found that for five particular pregnancy problems, the death risk was 2.4 to 3.3 times higher among black women. Preeclampsia, placenta abruptio, placenta previa, and postpartum hemorrhage were among them (Howell, 2018).
Scientific research has stressed the grief of mothers over deprivation of their children but little has been said historically about young children's loss of their mothers; this may have been because loss of the mother in infancy frequently meant death for a breast-fed infant.
The definition of "fetal death" promulgated by the World Health Organization in 1950 is as follows: "Fetal death" means death prior to the complete expulsion or extraction from its mother of a product of human conception, irrespective of the duration of pregnancy and which is not an induced termination of pregnancy. [63]
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The main differences lie in the state of the mother and fetus and the mechanism of delivery: in the event of natural, live childbirth, the mother's contractions thin and widen the cervix to expel the infant from the womb; in a case of coffin birth, built-up gas pressure within the putrefied body of a pregnant woman pushes the dead fetus from ...