[Purpose and usefulness of the present day risk catalog (author's transl)]

Risk catalogs have proved to be an important instrument of preventive medicine for the identification of pregnancies at risk. Their purpose and usefulness is beyond all doubt. Nevertheless problems of principle are attached to them since they deflect the attention from the living reality of the individual case to statistically formed collectives. The importance of the problems for risk catalogs changes according to the social change and the constantly improved perinatal results. Age, parity and socioeconomic risks reflect such trends in development most clearly. Future tasks lie in the quantification of risks by differentiating the degrees of severity. A certain intrinsic dynamism of the present risk catalogs leads, e. g. to a constantly increasing incidence of sections. For this reason a constant feedback must exist between risk catalog and statistics.