If you’ve heard our driving while pregnant stats, you may wonder how did we come to those numbers.
Greg, CEO of Safe Ride 4 Kids, is here to tell you where those stats of 3,000 pregnancies lost a year (about 8 per day) came from.
When we were first introduced to the Tummy Shield we delved into many published studies looking into the real risks to a pregnant women and her unborn baby from being in a car crash. From the 25 or so studies about driving while pregnant, we came to understand putting a number to this cause of miscarriage is difficult.
The reasons it’s difficult to come to one number include:
- Up to 20 weeks gestation the medical industry is not required to report miscarriages.
- During early pregnancy doctors consider pregnancy loss a statistical miscarriage and don’t look into the cause.
- It’s possible to have a miscarriage a few days to several weeks after a car crash and the two are never correlated.
- In most states the baby isn’t considered a person until after they are born so if a pregnant woman loses her baby in a car crash only in a few states would the person at fault be charged with that loss of life. (This may be the reason these crashes are rarely reported in the media also. We only find stories when someone is charged with the death or someone else in the vehicle had a fatal injury also.)
So it’s difficult to put a fixed number on pregnancies lost in a car crash.
The studies we’ve read ranged from a low of several hundred to a high of 5,000 or more. We choose to use 3,000 as it is the midpoint and average from all the studies. Studies do show that 170,000 car crashes a year involve pregnant women so we feel 3,000 is a realistic number.
To put driving while pregnant stats in perspective there are about 35 fatalities a year of children who die in a hot car, something there has been a lot of media attention about over the last few years, and about 400 fatalities a year of children ages 0-4 who die in car crashes.
As the driving while pregnant stats suggest, it is one of the riskiest things pregnant women will do and very few pregnancy resources are talking about the topic.
By Greg Durocher, CEO at Safe Ride 4 Kids and certified CPS Technician Instructor since 2002
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