But it is also possible that this is just a small random “down” that will be equivilant to small random “ups” that will happen over the next several years as we have peaked out in birth weight and are now in a secular holding pattern.

Untill the Teabaggers and Republicans and Libertarians take over and the US finally becomes a third rate “developing” nation with no health care and the babies start getting born more smaller, more sicker, and more deader, and more hopeless.

Not to inject politics into it or anything.

No shit. I clearly didn’t claim it was determined solely by ultrasound.

The point is ….they are being born SMALLER.

No shit. But the point of the study isn’t what you seem to think it is.

We are also getting more late term preemies with gestational ages of 36-37 weeks which may still be a pretty good size, but still need to be treated a little differently that full term infants.

The study is not looking at a decrease overall birthweight. Unfortunately all I have available is the abstract, but if I understand it correctly (and I may not), it appears that they attempted to control for everything they think might cause a difference in birthweight, and inexplicably still found a difference. So the cause must be something that was not obvious to them. I’m positing that they may have erred by unknowingly comparing babies of different gestational ages, and that might account for the difference. What’s your genius idea?

http://journals.lww.com/greenjournal/pages/articleviewer.aspx?year=2010&issue=02000&article=00023&type=abstract

But looking at this report out of Australia, their babies seem to be getting bigger.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19296812

That is what they do. I know it’s not used in all cases, but I’m pretty sure using ultrasound information in determining a due date is nothing out of the ordinary, especially in cases where a woman has an irregular period or doesn’t know the date of here last period.