Safe Ride 4 Kids Launches "Love of Babies" Kickstarter Campaign to Fund Mission to Promote Safe Driving Practices for Pregnant Women
Denver, CO. (PRWEB) March 10, 2015 -- "Safe Ride 4 Kids" launches the "Love of Babies" Kickstarter campaign to promote safe driving practices for pregnant women.
There are an estimated 3,000 pregnancies lost every year in the U.S. because of car crashes. Safe Ride 4 Kid's mission is to save the lives of unborn babies by helping expectant mothers keep babies safe while driving with the Tummy Shield™..
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration states that auto accidents are the single largest cause of death for pregnant women. Even when you think you are doing everything right, there is still a risk. Some of that risk, ironically, comes from the seat belt itself.
Many pregnant women find the seat belt uncomfortable and choose not wear a seat belt at all increasing the risk of injury or death to themselves and their baby. Refusing to wear a seat belt is especially dangerous on snow and ice covered roads where there is already an increased likelihood of an auto accident.
While it is three times safer for a pregnant woman to use a seat belt than to not use one, the very thing that is designed to hold her in the car and keep her from hitting the interior of the vehicle poses a risk to her and the pregnancy. The current seat belt configuration is designed to engage the hip bones to keep the occupant in the seat during a crash. The pregnancy is usually forward of the hip bones and the seat belt has to compress into the pregnancy to engage the hip bones and restrain the pregnant mother in the unfortunate event of an auto accident.
“We really do need to get more information and to design vehicles better for this special population,” Dr. Melissa Schiff, an obstetrician and epidemiologist at the University of Washington’s Harborview Injury Prevention and Research Center, who has done several studies on motor-vehicle crashes and pregnancy told NBC News in 2009. “It just really flies under the radar — people focus so much on infants and booster seats.”
The 2009 NBC News report said researchers and car manufacturers were shifting focus from infants and children in car safety and booster seats to how to prevent fetal deaths in the event of a car accident. Five years later the best advice for driving while pregnant remains the same as it has been for 50 + years, “wear the seat belt properly placed low across the hips and pelvis and have the shoulder portion across the chest”.
The majority of fetal deaths occur when the force of the crash tears the placenta from the uterus, which cuts off oxygen to the fetus. This is called placenta abruption.
Expecting moms don’t know the risks of driving and it is generally not a topic of conversation with her OB/GYN because the professionals may not even know the risks. Safe Ride 4 Kids aims to inform doctors, midwifes and expecting moms themselves of the dangers and what they can do to increase their odds of escaping a car crash unscathed.
Safe Ride 4 Kids is launching a Kickstarter campaign to help fund the creation of a video and the distribution of the video and supporting materials to the roughly 46,000 OB/Gyns, and 11,000 midwives in the United States. You can join them in their mission by visiting their Love the Babies campaign at http://www.TummyShield.com/Kickstarter.
One solution is an innovative product called the Tummy Shield, which the company knows will make the seat belt more comfortable for pregnant women to wear and increase the likelihood they will wear the seat belt to begin with. This crash tested device also makes driving safer for pregnant women by redirecting the lap portion of the seat belt away from the abdomen, creating a leg harness much like a race car driver or child’s 5-point harness.
Please visit our website http://www.TummyShield.com for more information.
Greg Durocher, Safe Ride 4 Kids, http://www.saferide4kids.com, +1 602-421-7233, [email protected]
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