So let's talk about risk because this is an important concept that underlies the whole topic of birth settings in the U.S.

As we move through this lecture, I'm going to take a lot of information from the Institute of Medicine's 2013 workshop on research in birth settings.

And the information from that workshop is actually freely available online. You can read the

PDF that lists all the findings of the workshop which I will post for you, as well as you can

watch the videos if you want to. So what does the term low risk actually mean? Well there's

actually no standard definition in the United States of the term

low risk. The United Kingdom does have a definition of low risk, and they define low risk as a woman

who does not have any medical complications during pregnancy and who is not pregnant with multiples.

So when we say low risk, what does this mean

at low risk for what? Well, almost all of the time, risk is referring to the risk for

preterm birth or the risk for something called perinatal morbidity and mortality. In other words,

the potential illness and or death of the fetus or newborn.

Low risk or high risk does not refer to the risk to the mother to experience illness or death.

The thing about risk is that it's dynamic. It can change throughout pregnancy, and we're not really sure if it can ever have one true definition,

because as the times change, as maternity care changes, people add and remove definitions to risk.

In 2013, the Institute of Medicine hosted a research workshop all about the research on birth settings,

and they couldn't even come up with a

definition of low or high risk. If they can't come up with a definition of low or high

risk then I'm not really sure if it can ever be truly definable. However at the

workshop they did give their best guests at a definition. They defined low risk as being pregnant with a single

baby, at term, the baby's in head first or vertex position, and there's no other medical

or surgical conditions of the mother. Well, some potential high risk conditions include

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