MATERNAL AND INFANT CARE - COMPARISONS BETWEEN WESTERN-EUROPE AND THEUNITED-STATES

A series of studies between 1986 and 1990 gathered data on maternal an d infant care in ten Western European countries with lower infant mort ality rates than the United States and compared the findings both with in the European countries and in aggregate with the United States. Res ults from these studies reveal great variation among the study countri es in how perinatal care is financed, staffed by professional and nonp rofessional health workers, and provided by public clinics or private offices, and in the number of and locale of the recommended number of prenatal visits. Invariably consistent among the study countries is th e nearly complete enrollment of childbearing women in early and contin uous prenatal care, and the strong linkage of that care to a generous spectrum of social supports and financial benefits. None of the benefi ts generally pertains in the United States. The relevance of these obs ervations for the United States suggests that current policies intende d to lower economic barriers to a highly medicalized version of matern ity care may yield disappointing results unless the perinatal sequence is linked to a more generous set of maternity-related social supports and financial benefits than is now contemplated.