Importance and necessity of prenatal care

Standardized full-cycle prenatal care can avoid more than 70% of adverse pregnancy outcomes in advance, and improve maternal and perinatal safety rates by at least 42%. This is the national maternal and child health monitoring data released by the National Health Commission in 2023, and I am not making it up casually. Regardless of whether you are a 20-year-old first-born child with full physical fitness, or a 40-year-old pregnancy with underlying diseases, as long as you take prenatal care as required, you can minimize the uncertainty of pregnancy to the greatest extent. This is its core value, and there is no one.

Don't tell me, I actually met a girl last year. She was 28 years old. She usually ran a half-marathon. She dared to go to the supermarket in unlined clothes in winter. She was pregnant with her first child and felt that there was nothing wrong with her. She was notified by the community that she wanted to be pregnant because she thought it would be troublesome to wait in line. She showed off her iced milk tea every day in the hot summer. At 28 weeks, her feet suddenly became swollen and she couldn't wear size 40 slippers. She came to the emergency room feeling dizzy. Her blood pressure was 160/110 and her urine protein was two plus, which means she was already preeclampsia. I was admitted to the hospital at that time. I couldn't save him after two weeks. I had a caesarean section at 30 weeks. The baby weighed just over two pounds and lived in an incubator for a month. The adults also suffered a lot. You said that if you had done care earlier and controlled blood sugar in advance, how could it be like this?

Of course, many people have different views, especially the elders in the family. They always say, "We didn't do any tests at that time, so we couldn't have given you a good birth." This is not unreasonable, but it is really survivor bias. In the early days of the founding of the People's Republic of China, our country's maternal mortality rate was 1,500/100,000, which means that for every 1,000 people who gave birth, 1.5 could not be saved. The perinatal mortality rate was even higher. By 2022, this number had dropped to 16.9/100,000, a difference of almost 100 times. Among them, the promotion of standardized prenatal care accounted for more than 60%. Those tragedies that are not seen by you and occur because of failure to intervene in time are the real risks of failure to provide care.

Many people's understanding of prenatal care is just "going to the hospital for a prenatal check-up", but this is not the case. I sometimes chat with pregnant mothers, saying that when you go home, don’t lie down all the time watching videos about “how painful is childbirth” and “how miserable is postpartum depression”. Walk downstairs for half an hour every day, eat less high-sugar milk tea cakes, and stop fighting with your husband over who washes the dishes to get rid of the gas. These are all part of prenatal care. There was a 32-year-old pregnant mother who quit her job after she became pregnant and stayed at home. She read negative news every day and suffered from insomnia all night long. Her blood pressure fluctuated during prenatal check-ups. We adjusted her care plan and asked her to go to a pregnant mother near her home. I took a class to learn how to make small clothes. I went to the park with my husband for a 40-minute walk every day after dinner, and turned off all notifications on maternal and infant apps. When I came back half a month later, my face brightened, my blood pressure stabilized, and I gave birth to a 7-pound girl.

Nowadays, there are actually different ideas about prenatal care. Western medicine is based on the gestational age. NT is done at 12 weeks, Tang screening is done at 16 weeks, glucose tolerance is done at 24 weeks, and fetal heart rate monitoring is done every week in the third trimester. These are gold standards that have been globally proven for decades and can screen out most birth defects and pregnancy complications in advance. There is also the idea of ​​prenatal care of traditional Chinese medicine, which emphasizes "month-by-month care of the fetus." For example, if the fetus is unstable in the first trimester, rest more and eat less spicy and blood-stimulating foods. In the second trimester, if the spleen and stomach are weak, eat more spleen-strengthening ingredients. In the third trimester, do more Qi-regulating exercises to help with childbirth. Nowadays, many public maternal and child health hospitals have opened prenatal clinics that combine traditional Chinese and Western medicine. The two methods are combined, and the effect is better. There is no need to worry about which one is more suitable. The one that suits you is the best.

Oh, by the way, last month a mother of her second child came for a postpartum check-up and specially brought us wedding candies. When she had her first child, she was working in other places, but she didn't do much because of the high cost of prenatal care. When the child was born, she was found to have favismosis. The whole family was panicked at that time, fearing that the child would have problems in the future. When she had her second child, she went to a high-risk clinic early and underwent genetic screening as required. The diet and medication during the entire pregnancy were strictly in accordance with the nursing plan. In the end, the child was born completely healthy. She held my hand and said, if she had known that she would pay more attention to the first child, she wouldn't have cried for half a month.

I have been in the obstetrics clinic for almost 8 years, and I have seen too many people go to extremes. They either think that prenatal care is an IQ tax and will not go if they can, or they are too anxious and want to have a B-ultrasound every week to feel relieved. In fact, it is really not necessary. Prenatal care is essentially a "safety insurance" for you and your child. It does not mean that if you do it, it will be 100% fine, but at least it can block most of the avoidable risks. Pregnancy is inherently an uncertain matter. If you pay more attention and take care according to the standards, in the end both adults and children will suffer less. That is enough.