:)) Yeah, Finns have been on top of that list for quite a while. (Background: my now retired mother did her life's work as a midwife, most of it as the head of the nurses in the biggest maternity hospital in Finland). The reason for the low infant and prenatal mortality rates is that Finland has had an excellent and free prenatal care system for almost a hundred years already. Midwives handle both the prenatal care and births; doctors get involved only if the midwife can't handle things on her own. Because of the system, "risk mothers" are found very early in the pregnancy and their problems can be addressed right away.
The thing to lure everybody to use the free prenatal care system is that only mothers visiting the maternity clinics get the free "maternity pack" (or money, if they want that instead) AND you need to have a statement from the clinic in order to get the state maternity allowance (about 70% of your salary for about ten months, mothers get that for three months and the last seven months can be split between the mother and father any which way).
Oh, and the child enters "the system" right after the birth: free child health clinics check all children on preset intervals, take care of the shots etc, and once the child goes to school, the school takes over the health care.
As a side note (hee!), even though my mother is a hard-boiled and enthusiastic professional, she was utterly useless when I was giving birth to my daughters (she wasn't my midwife, though). I think the logic in that was something like "EEEEEP! My BABY is having a BABY!!"
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The thing to lure everybody to use the free prenatal care system is that only mothers visiting the maternity clinics get the free "maternity pack" (or money, if they want that instead) AND you need to have a statement from the clinic in order to get the state maternity allowance (about 70% of your salary for about ten months, mothers get that for three months and the last seven months can be split between the mother and father any which way).
Oh, and the child enters "the system" right after the birth: free child health clinics check all children on preset intervals, take care of the shots etc, and once the child goes to school, the school takes over the health care.
As a side note (hee!), even though my mother is a hard-boiled and enthusiastic professional, she was utterly useless when I was giving birth to my daughters (she wasn't my midwife, though). I think the logic in that was something like "EEEEEP! My BABY is having a BABY!!"