Many adults with CP, as well as doctors and lawyers, believe that a major cause of CP occurs when oxygen flowing to a baby’s brain during birth is interrupted. But a new study show that the lack of oxygen accounts for only about 10% of all cases of CP. More important causes are infections developed by the mother during pregnancy, as well blood disorders and clotting which damage the infant’s brain.

The results of the study are expected to be used in court cases where doctors are accused of negligence by not taking precautions that would assure adequate supplies of oxygen. If CP, in fact, is caused by infections or blood disorders developed before the mother entered the hospital, the doctor can not be held responsible.

The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists and the American Academy of Pediatrics sponsored the study, which was reported in the Feb. 26th issue of the New York Times.

The study focused on the "medical" causes of CP and did not investigate social and economic factors that can create conditions that cause CP. For example, stress and lack of adequate medical care in economically deprived areas can lead to maternal infections and/or premature deliveries which in turn puts an infant at greater risk for CP.

Judi Rogers, a mother with CP won the nation's highest honor for community health leadership: the 2002 Robert Wood Johnson Community Health Leadership Program award. Rogers is a staff member at Through the Looking Glass, a Berkeley nonprofit organization focusing on families in which an infant, child or parent has a disability.

Through the Looking Glass provides information through bulletin boards, conferences and publications for people with CP and other disabilities who are parents or are thinking about becoming parents.  The organization strives to create a dialogue between nonpeers, people with disabilities, parents of children with disabilities, siblings, spouses and adult children of parents with disabilities, and people without disabilities.

Carol Gill

Any authentic discussion of health issues affecting women with disabilities will reveal two leitmotives that surface repeatedly to link seemingly disparate topics. One theme is invisibility. Women with disabilities have been working hard to emerge from decades of neglect in medical services and research, including programs expressly designed to encompass the diversity of all women's health needs. The second theme is genderlessness. When women with disabilities write about or tell each other our stories, we inevitably exchange complaints of feeling treated not as women at all, but as some kind of neutral gender or nonsexual being.

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