By Navya Krishna, Independent Contributor
Pregnancy is a scary thought in high school. For some, it’s just as scary when they are adults.
Pregnancy is probably not something that, as high school students, we want to think about yet. Then why should we care about its dangers? The answer is this: because we all have to grow up one day, and it may be something that many of us should consider.
For a little over a year, I have been a student in the Independent Research Program here at River Hill. As a woman and someone interested in medicine, I chose to study maternal mortality from cardiovascular disease in the US. Cutting through all of the big words, this means that women in the US are dying from pregnancy complications related to their heart.
You may not know this, but a woman’s heart has to pump 50% more blood through her body during pregnancy. This strain can cause problems as severe as heart failure, which is more common in women with a history of heart disease, but not unheard of in women without any previous heart conditions.
This isn’t a common problem in many other developed countries, but it’s on the rise here. In a study conducted by my advisor, Dr. Elyse Foster, a Professor Emeritus at the University of California San Francisco, and some of her colleagues, identifies that healthcare can help prevent a large percent of these deaths. Dr. Foster and her colleagues were tasked with finding the best method of reducing pregnancy-related deaths in California. In 2015, they had a paper published in a medical journal about their study. Their results were not all that shocking. In the paper, they urge better treatment of these heart conditions. They advise physicians to be more suspicious of heart failure symptoms masquerading as pregnancy symptoms and to refer their patients to specialists sooner.
In an interview that I conducted with her in December of 2018, she also emphasized the importance of prenatal care. She told me that “many of the people who died [in the study] didn’t have access to care…until very late in their pregnancy. Didn’t have the usual prenatal care”. She talked extensively about places where access to health care is actually decreasing, saying that “in Texas, [where] they closed a lot of the Planned Parenthood clinics…aside from the issue of abortion…many women got all of there prenatal care there. They got all of their contraception there…[Because of] closing these clinics, people weren’t getting prenatal care properly, there weren’t many places because they didn’t have any other options, and maternal mortality seemed to go up as these clinics declined in numbers”.
Regardless of how you feel about the politics of healthcare in the US, you can’t deny that women are dying from pregnancy. As a race that depends on pregnancy for its survival, we have an obligation to help women in every way that we can, including protecting their lives. Even if you don’t get actively involved in helping women access healthcare, at least remember this when you plan your future.
Just something to think about.