Study Asks Term Limits In Womb The More Time Between Pregnancies, The Better Chance Of Healthy Full-Term Babies

Women should wait at least nine months between pregnancies to improve the chances of producing healthy full-term infants, a study concludes.

The advice appears to be especially important for black mothers. The study found that spacing babies closely together is more likely to result in undersized babies for them than for whites.

Prematurity is the major cause of infant deaths in the United States. The research suggests that black mothers’ tendency to get pregnant again quickly is one reason their infant mortality rate is twice as high as whites’.

“If we could encourage women to give themselves nine months between pregnancies, we are likely to see a narrowing of the difference in pregnancy outcomes between black and white women in the United States,” said Dr. James S. Rawlings.

Women need to pause between pregnancies so they can build up the nutritional reserves necessary for a growing fetus.

Rawlings conducted the study with his wife, Virginia, a nutritionist, and Dr. John A. Read at the Madigan Army Medical Center in Tacoma. It was published in today’s issue of the New England Journal of Medicine.

Infant mortality has fallen dramatically for both blacks and whites in recent decades, but the gap between the races has remained stubbornly constant.

Experts once attributed this largely to poor pregnancy care for black women. While this and other effects of poverty may play a role, newer evidence suggests the reasons are more complex.

For instance, one recent study found that even the babies of collegeeducated blacks are twice as likely as whites to die in infancy.

The latest study is especially noteworthy because it was conducted at an Army hospital, where no one is poor. All the mothers receive highquality prenatal care, and black families have about the same income as whites.

Despite these equal circumstances, 7 percent of the black mothers studied delivered premature babies, compared with 3 percent of whites.

Birth spacing explained the difference, the researchers said: If the black women had waited nine months between pregnancies, their birth outcomes would have been just as good as the whites’.