Ivy is just over a year old today, happy and healthy and doing just fine. Exactly one year ago she was in the NICU, she weighed between two and three pounds, and she was learning to eat and breathe and regulate her body temperature.
Ivy's early birth was not preventable with our current level of medical knowledge. I had a condition called HELLP syndrome, and she had to be born so that we could both survive.
A lot of premature births are preventable. Smoking during pregnancy is a cause of premature birth. Lack of dental care is another cause; gum disease has been linked to premature birth and low birth weight. Lack of prenatal care is a big problem; moms can't afford it, or are trying to hide a pregnancy so they don't seek it, or they don't realize that it is necessary.
As sad as those causes are, nothing makes me more angry than the doctors who induce labor early, for their convenience. Induced labor is harder on mom and baby, leads to emergency c-sections more often, and is sometimes done before baby is ready to come out. In the U.S., roughly ten percent of premature births are due to early, unnecessary, inductions and c-sections. These are performed by doctors who are supposed to help, not hurt, their little patients.
My tiny little baby doesn't seem to have any lasting effects from her early arrival in the world. We are lucky that some potential problems with her growth were caught early and monitored, and that when I developed preeclampsia at six months my midwife caught it and kept an eye on it. Preeclampsia tends to run in families, so I hope that by the time my daughters have children, we know what causes it and can prevent or treat it. I also hope we get better at preventing premature birth from other causes so that more little babies are born healthy.
