Of Diabetic Mothers and Their Babies

In this book, Harold Kalter challenges the belief that the babies of women with insulin-dependent diabetes are congenitally malformed more often than babies of nondiabetic women He traces the origin of this idea to a survey of births to diabetic women in a Danish hospital reported in 1964 and follows the trail of literature to the present Kalter points out the two errors most responsible for the faulty theory, a loose definition of the term malformation and the use of misrepresentative studies Specifically, Kalter argues that the use of patients who are cared for in hospital diabetes departments and specialized diabetes clinics does not represent the entire population of diabetic women accurately Building on these weaknesses, Kalter argues that congenital malformations do not occur, and probably never have occurred, more frequently in the children of diabetic women