Investigates, Discovers, Questions This week:
Will the Baby Be All Right?
Denise is going home to a bedsit in a Manchester slum, but she's taking a living, healthy baby with her. Linda was warned that she might be carrying a deformed foetus, but she gave birth to a perfect baby girl. They were ' high risk' mothers who were lucky. Others were not. Christina had an intuitive fear that something had gone wrong with her baby - it was born dead. Kay, who wasn't tested in pregnancy, produced a spina bifida baby that has needed 12 operations just to stay alive. And a young nurse called Denise Hennessy gave birth to a son who will never walk, or hear, or see ... because she had german measles at the most dangerous stage of pregnancy.
Every year in Britain 40,000 women have babies that are born dead or handicapped. This programme is about some of those women. It tries to find out why there are so many ' high risk' mothers in this country and why most of them aren't getting the care they deserve.
Reporter MICHAEL DEAN
Producer ANN PAUL Editor TIM SLESSOR