Campaign urges pregnant women to track movement to detect in utero stress

E| mily Eekhoff was in the 33rd week of her second pregnancy when she made an unsettling discovery.

As she had with her first baby, Liam, Eekhoff had been religiously keeping track of the number of kicks her unborn baby delivered during the third trimester.

This baby had been consistent, kicking about 10 times in a 10-minute period. But that day, in 2017, “I noticed she was not moving like she normally did,” said Eekhoff, of Ankeny, Iowa. “That day, it was like three or four kicks in a couple hours.”

She alerted her doctor’s office and was told to immediately go to the hospital, where the staff detected a heartbeat but couldn’t coax more movement. When an ultrasound revealed the baby was in distress, Eekhoff was quickly dispatched to an operating room for an emergency cesarean section.

Out came baby Ruby, with her umbilical cord wrapped three times tightly around her neck. “The on-call doctor who examined the ultrasound said that if they had waited even a day longer, she probably would have died,” Eekhoff recalled.

Ruby, now 15 months old and scooting around the house, was the beneficiary of the mothers-initiated campaign “Count the Kicks.” Started in 2008 in Iowa, it teaches pregnant women to track the movements of their unborn babies in the last trimester of pregnancy so they can quickly detect in utero distress. The campaign has corresponded to a nearly 28 percent drop in stillbirths in Iowa — and it is starting to spread.

Campaigns based on the Iowa model have been launched in Nebraska, Illinois, Kansas and Missouri, the last two this year and both with state financing. Emily Price, executive director of Count the Kicks, the nonprofit group behind the campaign, said there are plans for launches by the end of the year in Alabama and Ohio.

Many doctors have long urged pregnant women to pay attention to fetal kicks. But too many physicians still rely on what they glean from routine office visits, even though waiting for the next scheduled appointment may be too late, said Jason Collins, a Louisiana obstetrician who has practiced for 30 years and has studied stillbirths.

“Mom is the best evaluator of the baby’s status,” Collins said. “Educating moms about kick counts is the path to preventing stillbirth.”