" Incompatible With Life, " Compatible With Love: Perinatal Hospice and Palliative Care

by Amy KuebelbeckIt ' s a relatively new phenomenon: With advances in prenatal testing, some parents who are happily anticipating the birth of their baby instead receive the devastating news that their baby is expected to die.Then what? Often, the default recommendation is to terminate the pregnancy and try again. A growing number of parents prefer to continue their pregnancies and embrace their babies ' lives for however long they might last, even if that time is only before birth. But a distressing number of these parents report feeling abandoned by their caregivers and even chastised and criticized for choosing this path.[1]As one mother told me, “The only option offered was termination. In spite of us insisting we wanted to continue this pregnancy, the medical personnel who handled us on the day of the diagnosis didn’t offer us any other help. They kept emphasizing that ‘no one carries a baby with this condition’ and how terrible it would be. They kept saying that Trisomy 18 is ‘incompatible with life.’ The pressure to terminate was tremendous.”[2]In response to the needs of parents like this, a new model of care has been quietly growing. First proposed in the medical literature in 1997[3] and then making its debut in the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology in 2001,[4] the concept was dubbed perinatal hospice. It integrates the philosophy and expertise of hospice and palliative care with best practices in perinatal bereavement care for miscarriage,...

Source: Pallimed: A Hospice and Palliative Medicine Blog - October 17, 2016 Category: Palliative Care Tags: hospice pediatric PedPC perinatal Source Type: blogs