[Pregnancy in the diabetic woman]

The authors review ten years of caring for pregnant diabetic women. They adhered rigidly in these ten years to two fundamental principles, which were the need to ensure rigorous control of blood sugar levels, and the value of waiting to the 37th or 38th week before starting labour whenever the fetus did not seem to be particularly at risk. Their attitude, which has stayed remarkably constant, is different from that of many other authors who during this same period started by stopping the pregnancy prophylactically between the 34th and 36th week but later allowed labour to start sometimes spontaneously at a later stage as knowledge of feto-maternal mechanisms increased and methods of supervising these patients improved.