Fetal cardiovascular responses to distress. A review

This review is designed to provide a broad view of fetal cardiovascular response to fetal distress. The presentation focuses on data obtained from laboratories working with fetal sheep, or occasionally fetal monkeys, instead of attempting to interpret data resulting from human fetal studies. Human fetal studies are unsatisfactory for any detailed analysis other than discussions of an occasional case history because of the difficulty of identifying controls and because cardiovascular experimentation is not ethically possible.