I love it when the world gives me a good case study

Women of childbearing age, you'd better take a prenatal vitamin whether you're on birth control or not, because there is still a slim chance you could become pregnant and as we all know, your primary responsibility is not to yourself as a human being but to any and all future person who may or may not issue from your womb.

And now that we've got that straightened up, let's really play it up a little by throwing out a lot of terrifying and confusing statistics, shall we? According to one study, almost 1 in 17 babies worldwide is born with "serious birth defects -- a hidden epidemic of global proportions." But let's not mention that a good number of those outside of the Western world are likely due to specific environmental pollutants like depleted uranium and contaminated drinking water, and a prenatal vitamin is going to do dick all for them.

"The study, commissioned by the March of Dimes, said that, all told, almost eight million children annually suffer from a birth defect, including 3.3 million who die and another 3.2 million who live with severe mental and physical disabilities that often condemn them to a life of poverty and suffering." We won't mention the other 1.5 million who presumably are living reasonably good lives, or the proportion of the 3.2 million who have serious disabilities but who have not been condemned to a lifetime of poverty and suffering.

"Birth defects principally involve deformities of the heart and spine, and blood disorders, but up to 70 per cent of the conditions are preventable with simple public-health measures and basic medical technologies." I'm all for simple public-health measures. By all means, encourage women to take prenatal vitamins, even though expecting women on long-term birth control measures to do so on the off chance that the birth control fails and they decide not to terminate is plain stupid--sure, half of all pregnancies are unplanned, but how many multivitamins would it take exactly among the female population at large to prevent even one case of a serious birth defect? And what if a woman who's not planning on having kids actually needs or wants the additional vitamin A not contained in a prenatal vitamin? She should give it up for good because, you never know, condoms break sometimes? Yet another fabulous example of how a hypothetical fetus is more important than an actual woman.

But even ignoring that, what exactly do you suppose is meant by "basic medical technologies?" Surely I am being overly cynical in supposing that this might be doublespeak for termination. Surely?

If they had just stopped the article before they started blathering about the untold horrors that await any woman foolish enough to ignore this crucial advice (1/17! Serious birth defects! Death! A life of hardship and poverty!) it might actually have been a decent article. Hey, I'm all for prentatal multivitamins--I'm taking them myself, in fact, with a good extra dose of folic acid for the diabetes--and I think it's fabulous that a simple pill taken daily can prevent birth defects. Wonderful! Great! Let's make it available to every woman who is thinking about or actively trying to conceive (as a public-health measure, sponsored by the government, it would surely pay for itself). But how on earth throwing out a lot of scare-mongering about the terrors of birth defects was intended to add in a positive way to the article at all, I can't fathom.

In Canada, the baseline number of congenital anomalies in newborns is 2-3%, not 1/17. Some of them will lead to death in the neonatal period. Others will indeed lead to considerable hardship and poverty. But thanks to the health care system and universal public education, as well as a little something called Human Rights, most birth defects are not actually a lifelong sentence to utter misery, and the most common "basic medical technology" used to "prevent" birth defects is a surgical abortion (in the same time period that surgical terminations of affected fetuses went up over 500%, neonatal deaths from congenital abnormalities when down 21% according to one Canadian study--which seems, if you ask me, like some very slippery accounting to support his recommendation that prenatal testing and access to abortion services be increased in all regions across Canada).

Posted by Andrea at August 31, 2006 11:15 AM under Female Trouble

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