[Spirits were high as the march reached the…]

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Spirited

Spirits were high as the march reached the Scottish Office to present a petition signed by supporters en route from Greenock.

But even this spirited end to their march could have been so much more powerful if it had been timed to coincide with the 15,000-strong anti-cuts strike and demonstration that had filled the streets of Edinburgh just two days earlier. FOR YEARS the medical profession has told women that giving birth in hospital is far safer than giving birth at home.

Many women have had it put to them that they are being selfish in preferring to give birth in the supportive surroundings of their own homes rather than endure productionline maternity wards with chronic understaffing and routine inducement of births.

Nowadays, over 90% of births take place in hospit: als (70% in 1970), with about 6% in General Practitioner Maternity Units (GPMU) and under 2% at home.

It is therefore rather a shock to read, in an article research statistician at the Nottingham University Medical School, in the Guardian (23.6.81) that, after allowing for abnormal and risky births, not only is it more dangerous to give birth in hospital than at home or in a GPMU, but that this has been known to the medical profession since statistics were first collected in 1958.

Thus in 1970 it was found that the perinatal mortality rate (PNMR: the rate of stillbirths and deaths in the first week of life) in hospitals, for normal births, for was nearly three times that for births at home and in GPMUs (17 per thousand and six per thousand respectively).

Unfortunately, the article raises more questions than it answers. How have these figures been arrived at? What do new-born babies die from at home and in hospital? Are there fewer problems when a full antenatal course has been followed, or in 'natural childbirth' units, as opposed to when induction of birth has President Raygun's latest top government appointment is fast threatening to make Carter's administration look like Lenin's Council of People's Commissars.

I've already mentioned Secretary of the Interior James G Watt, responsible for America's public lands, who said 'my responsibility is to follow the scriptures which call upon us to occupy the land until Jesus returns.' Dan Greenberg, who writes in New Scientist on the Washington science scene, gives an up-to-date list of Watt's colleagues this week.

Dr. C. Everett Koop, originally intended to be the US's top health official and now one of them, believes that abortion will lead to infanticide, followed

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by Andrew Hornung THE BOMB blast that Socialist Organiser July 11, frequently tortured... in some cases in the same jails that held them while

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Watt of the wolf pack