Pregnancy and Birth Defects Essay

Submitted By rachel0421
Words: 320
Pages: 2

Every 4.5 minutes, a baby it being born with birth defects, like Down syndrome, Spina Bifida, Craniosynostosis and others. Also, 20 percent of infant deaths are the leading deaths in the United States. A lot of these children go through surgery due to the type of defect they are born with and issues they go through every day for the rest of their life. In fact, there is an estimate that about 3 percent of all children are born with major defects; minor defects or variations are estimated to occur in 10 percent to 15 percent of birth. Sometimes it may be single or multiple. The multiple malformations that occurs in a regular recognizable pattern are referred to as syndromes, for example, the Fetal Alcohol Syndrome happens to an infants of mothers who drank heavily when they were pregnant. There are many reasons why children have birth defects due to the fact that mothers don’t take care of their self, genetics and pollution; should be the blame for the cause of child defect.
Inherited defects causes a higher number of different birth defect. In fact, 60 percent is found from pollutions and others causes but 20 percent is divided equally between single-gene disorders, chromosomal syndromes and teratogenic causes.(Polzin 2005) Single- gene disorder means when one parents genes are dominant and the other parent has a recessive gene, which means that the unborn infant would get the genes from the parent that has the dominant gene. In some cases when both parents have recessive