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Article ID: CBB001421094

Making Birth Defects “Preventable”: Pre-Conceptional Vitamin Supplements and the Politics of Risk Reduction (2014)

Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences
Volume: 47, Part B
Issue: Part B
Pages: 278-289
Publication date: 2014
Language: English

Publication Date: 2014
Edition Details: Article in a special issue, “Transforming Pregnancy Since 1900”

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Public health Reproductive medicine Clinical medicine Women and health Vitamins Risk Obstetrics and pregnancy Prenatal care and diagnosis 20th century Great Britain

Since the mid-1990s, governments and health organizations around the world have adopted policies designed to increase women's intake of the B-vitamin `folic acid' before and during the first weeks of pregnancy. Building on initial clinical research in the United Kingdom, folic acid supplementation has been shown to lower the incidence of neural tube defects (NTDs). Recent debate has focused principally on the need for mandatory fortification of grain products with this vitamin. This article takes a longer view, tracing the transformation of folic acid from a routine prenatal supplement to reduce the risk of anaemia to a routine `pre-conceptional' supplement to `prevent' birth defects. Understood in the 1950s in relation to social problems of poverty and malnutrition, NTDs were by the end of the century more likely to be attributed to individual failings. This transition was closely associated with a second. Folic acid supplements were initially prescribed to `high-risk' women who had previously borne a child with a NTD. By the mid-1990s, they were recommended for all women of childbearing age. The acceptance of folic acid as a `risk-reducing drug' both relied upon and helped to advance the development of preventive and clinical practices concerned with women's health before pregnancy.

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Article Olszynko-Gryn, Jesse (2014) The Demand for Pregnancy Testing: The Aschheim--Zondek Reaction, Diagnostic Versatility, and Laboratory Services in 1930s Britain. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences (pp. 233-247). unapi

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