Abortion ban leads to higher infant mortality

Malta's high infant morality rate among industrialised countries could be due to the fact that foetuses with fatal disability are not aborted before they are born, according to doctors.

Speaking at a press conference, St Luke's Hospital's maternity department head Mark Brincat explained that a good percentage of babies who die soon after birth have an incurable "lethal congenital disorder".

Prof. Brincat said the defects were often diagnosed before birth, and in a number of other countries parents are given the choice of having an abortion. But in Malta every baby was given the chance to live.

Department of Health Information principal medical officer Miriam Dalmas said congenital anomalies were the cause of 50 per cent of perinatal (around the time of birth) deaths in 2003.

St Luke's Hospital's paediatrics department chairman, Simon Attard Montalto, explained that a good number of women who had an abortion in other countries did so because the unborn baby had congenital defects which would make it virtually impossible for it to live.

However, neither of the doctors was in any way promoting abortion in order to decrease Malta's mortality statistics. In fact, Dr Attard Montalto said that every year one or two babies whose prognosis was very poor actually beat the odds and pulled through.

Malta placed second to last in a report on infant mortality published recently by the organisation Save The Children, together with the US, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia, with a death rate of five per 1,000. Latvia ranked at the bottom among 33 industrialised countries with six deaths for every 1,000 live births.

Dr Dalmas, explained that World Health Organisation statistics for 2001 and 2003 showed that at 5.5 for every 1,000, Malta's perinatal mortality was lower than the average of the EU 15 (6.5 per 1,000) and the EU 25 (6.4 per 1,000).

Dr Attard Montalto pointed out that while some years ago babies born at 30 weeks had a low chance of survival, the tables had turned and today those babies' chances had improved dramatically.

He said that while advances were being made, and the Special Care Baby Unit was equipped with state-of-the-art equipment, the unit was supporting babies born much earlier who were at higher risk and had bigger problems.

Prof. Brincat highlighted that today many child-bearing women with problems were being helped to conceive and to have a healthy baby.

However, obstetricians were coming across more high-risk pregnancies than they used to some years ago - such as teenage mothers as well as more women starting a family later in life. To make matters worse, Malta had a high rate of obesity, high blood pressure and diabetes.

Prof. Brincat said premature delivery was causing a number of perinatal deaths, adding that there were times when obstetricians decided to give birth to a baby before its due date because it was at risk in the womb. The tendency in Europe was for babies to be born early.