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Arquivos de Medicina

On-line version ISSN 2183-2447

Abstract

LOUREIRO, Rui; BERNARDES, João; FERREIRA, Manuela  and  FREITAS, Paula. Birth in Portugal: a national descritive study. Arq Med [online]. 2014, vol.28, n.6, pp.167-171. ISSN 2183-2447.

Introduction: Recent transformations have influenced the circumstances of birth and the experience of motherhood. We assessed the actual characteristics of pregnancy and birth giving in Portugal. Methods: Quantitative, observational, descriptive cross-sectional study. The studied population were the 96925 puerperal women of year 2007 and the sample the 2505 women from 19 hospitals from all over the country, who answered a questionnaire. Results: The puerperal women were on average 29.4 years old and 16.7% were over 35. The average number of children was 1.56, with 89.5% of deliveries in the North and Centre of the country and in Lisbon. 73.4% of pregnancies were planned and only 0.2% were not medically supervised. Complications occurred in 21.3% of the cases, namely miscarriage (4.0%) and diabetes (3.0%). in 21.4% of pregnancies there was training for childbirth. delivery was performed by a physician in 53.9% of cases, at 38.8 weeks average gestational age. Eutocic delivery occurred in 54.5% of cases and caesarean section in 34.7%. Epidural analgesia occurred in 74.7% of cases and 74.5% of eutocic births had the presence of a support person. Conclusions: With a late age for having children, an average number of children close to one and a high rate of births form non-married couples. More than half of the deliveries were performed by a physician with a high caesarean section rate and a wide national availability of epidural analgesia and of a support person for the mother.

Keywords : maternity; hospital delivery; descriptive study.

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