Abstract
In the developed countries attention has now shifted to the area of perinatal morbidity after successfully reducing maternal and perinatal mortality to the lowest levels. In the Sudan, with our ten times incidence of maternal mortality, the battle is still towards improving this result, but this should not prevent us from improving our results of perinatal morbidity. Nowadays, obstetric practice is concentrating on the antenatal and intrapartum well-being of the fetus because adverse antenatal factors can affect the postnatal growth and development. Small for dates infants have neonatal mortality rates four times that of the normal -weight infants. Mental retardation is another hazard if they manage to live; the incidence is 18 percent if the weight is more than two standard deviations below the mean weight (6). Which pregnancies need monitoring? Recognition of such pregnancies is not easy. Clinical methods can detect only 30 percent. The fact that intra-uterine growth, retardation is associated with pathological complications of pregnancy such as pre-eclampsia, chronic renal disease, hypertension. and so on is opposed by the occurance of over 50 percent of IUGR in pregnancies uncomplicated by such pathological states. There are two groups-who require antenatal monitoring. Patients with; (1) History of stillbirth or with a complicating factor known to be associated with IUGR e.g. PET, chronic renal disease, hypertension, diabetes mellitus, multiple pregnancy, anaemia etc. (2) Those who may be regarded as having normal pregnancy but whose fetuses are suffering from IUGR (50 percent).