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of what they regarded unnecessary child losses in the process of childbirth. The maternal death rate in childbirth in this country was higher than in most civilized countries. It was very shocking to doctors who looked into it. It was quite high in New York City, Chicago, and the big cities where they had the gist of their information. They didn't have so much knowledge about the country.

They felt that something should be done about it. Among the women who were cared for by obstetricians, men who were specialists in the field and had hospitals under their command and were trained in various techniques of the modern care of pregnancy and childbirth, their losses were almost zero. They were infinitesimal. The difference between those losses and the losses of the population generally struck them as very shocking. Something ought to be done about it. Here again was social justice operating in a field where nobody had thought of it before. These doctors, who were themselves leading obstetricians, thought that what was done for their private patients ought to be done for everybody.

Their key to the solution was largely in what they called pre-natal care. The Department of Public Health and Public Welfare in New York City cooperated with them in determining the facts. So far as they could make out there was practically no pre-natal care in the average case in New