Birth interval of greater than two years was found to be associated with the best perinatal outcome; those born less than 18 months after a previous birth fared the worst (AOR = 2.73; 95% CI 2.25-3.31; p < 0.001).
The Daily Telegraph's Richard Dorment wrote: "When some bright spark at Tate Britain came up with the idea of doing a show about the history of iconoclasm in this country, why wasn't the plan strangled at birth?" Others have fared better.
Infant mortality rate doesn't provide any reason to celebrate either with the US (6.9 death per 100 live birth in 2006) faring much worse than our "shoestring" friends such as Canada (5.3), Germany (4.1), Spain (3.5), or Japan (2.8).
In recent years, scientists have begun to home in on more subtle effects, studying how unborn fetuses respond to their mothers' anxiety or depression, the emotional health of the infants after birth and how they fare later in childhood.
Despite its reputation as an enclave for humanities graduates, journalism is endlessly focussed on numbers: economic growth, benefit cuts, political polling, house prices, opinion surveys, crime stats, health risks, fare rises, birth rates, pass rates, unemployment rates, mortality rates.
When these predictions turn out to be wrong (e.g. during a food shortage or a period of maternal anxiety that reverses after the birth, babies surprisingly, seem to fare worse than if the conditions had remained constant).
How well premature infants fare depends on their birth weight -- every extra ounce improves their chances -- and on whether they suffer any serious complications.
"Those were true difference makers," Clooney says Incidentally, for those wondering where the 1939 classic Gone With the Wind fits into Clooney's assessment, it doesn't fare much better than Birth of a Nation.
For one, we do not know how birth outcomes of contemporary Hmong women fare in comparison to other Asian subgroups since the reference groups in the two studies mentioned above are either whites or all Asians.
It is difficult for doctors to know if low-birth-weight babies born today will fare any better than those born a decade ago.
