A new University of Michigan study is the fourth in the country to look at fear of childbirth and how that fear might affect outcomes for mother and baby. However, it is the first qualitative study and the first to include any people of color or lesbian women.
The study was conducted by Lisa Kane Low, president of the American College of Nurse Midwives, and Lee Roosevelt, a nurse midwife and Clinical Assistant Professor at the Michigan School of Nursing.
"As clinicians, we knew that women really carried away some anxieties and fears as you talk to them in their prenatal visits," Low told us. "So we started to think about, how does this really impact the big picture of their experiences and their outcomes? If you put all the individual women's stories together that we were seeing, what is it that we can learn about and know about to be able to do a better job to reduce that fear?"
Low and Roosevelt tell us about their study and what they found in our conversation above.
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