High-risk pregnancies have a silver lining

High-risk pregnancies are on the rise in the United States and may be more common now than at any other time since modern obstetric care became available.

Why? More fortysomething moms are having babies, and epidemics of diabetes, obesity and high blood pressure are causing pregnancy and birth complications.

But in this otherwise troubling trend is also some good news: A small but growing number of women are successfully having children despite life-threatening conditions that once made a safe pregnancy almost inconceivable.

Exact numbers are not available, but doctors say that tens of thousands of organ transplant recipients, breast cancer survivors, women with heart defects, and even women with the AIDS virus have decided to risk childbearing in the last several years.

Not all of these stories have happy endings, and many people worry that some of these women will not live long enough to raise their children, or that they will pass on their medical problems.

But most results have been so surprisingly good that they are overturning decades of gloomy dogma about who is medically fit to have a child.

"These people define a whole new era of pregnancy for us," said Temple University's Dr. Vincent Armenti, who runs a registry that tracks births to transplant patients.

"We have to change our mind-set about the perfect pregnancy," he said. Women should be given advice based on solid research "instead of an emotional feeling that some people just shouldn't have a baby."

No one knows precisely how many high-risk pregnancies there are. It is a catchall term that in the past has meant the mom is over 35 or has a condition like high blood pressure that is dangerous for her or her fetus. But as these situations have become more common, even this loose definition is changing.

Births to women 35 and older are soaring. And many complications are becoming so routine that nurse midwives can manage them instead of sending women to high-risk care specialists. Doctors around the country say they are treating far more of these risky cases than they did a decade ago.