Risky Business (Letters) (Letter to the Editor‪)‬

To the Editor: In their very fine "Risk and the Pregnant Body" (Nov-Dec 2009), Annie Lyerly and her colleagues write persuasively about the opposite ways in which health care professionals go wrong where pregnant women are concerned. Women's nonobstetrical medical needs, they report, are undertreated because the risks of intervention loom so large in professionals' thinking that they drive out considerations of the risks of not intervening. Conversely, though, laboring women are overtreated, because here the risks of not intervening drive out considerations of the risks of intervention. Nor are health care professionals the only ones whose thinking is distorted in this way. Pregnancy advice books, Internet sites, friends, neighbors, and total strangers are only too eager to tell pregnant women what they must and must not do to preserve their fetus's health and well-being, regardless of the evidence of actual risk.