Fetal Deaths Related to Maternal Injury

Abstract

Trauma during pregnancy has been recognized as an important cause of adverse fetal and maternal outcomes.¹ While early reports described incidents resulting from falls, blows, and assaults,² later reports increasingly involved automobile crashes.^3,4 By the mid-1960s, the problem of pregnancy and motor vehicle crashes was recognized by trauma and obstetric specialists.^5-7 Over the next decade, many hospital-based case series of fetal outcome following maternal trauma were published.^8-17 However, even for the most severe outcomes resulting in fetal or neonatal death, the lack of inclusion of such cases in vital statistics reports and exclusion from injury surveillance systems have led to a lack of population-based statistics. These data are needed to understand the relative public health burden and the proportional contributions of different injury mechanisms. Such understanding is needed to put these incidents in context with other injury-related deaths and to target prevention efforts.