Medicine: One Every Year?

People who practice “planned parent hood” believe that babies should be born at two-year intervals. This cherished tenet is wrong — if Johns Hopkins’ Dr. Nichol son Joseph Eastman is right. Last week he asserted (in the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology) that the two-year interval was deduced from obsolete statistics.

After riffling through records of some 35,188 obstetric cases, Dr. Eastman concluded that: i) a baby born twelve months after a previous birth has just as good a chance to be healthy as one that has had to wait longer; 2) the longer the interval between births, the more likelihood of a mother’s suffering from a type of pregnancy poisoning associated with high blood pressure. Reason: the shorter interval enables mothers to have more children during youth, the best child-bearing time.

Surprised Planned Parenthood officials last week admitted that the Eastman report had knocked the props from under their Two-Year Plan, thought that new research on the question is much needed.