Relationship of prenatal diagnosis and pregnancy termination to overall infant mortality in Canada.

Abstract
Infant mortality rates have declined dramatically during the last few decades in most industrialized countries.1-6 Between 1991 and 1995, however, Canadian infant mortality rates stagnated between 6.1 and 6.4 per 1000 live births.7 In fact, the infant mortality rate in 1993 (6.3 per 1000 live births) was higher than the infant mortality rate in 1992 (6.1 per 1000 live births), a phenomenon that had not occurred for 3 decades. The trends in Canadian infant mortality rates in the early 1990s, especially the increase in 1993, have been attributed to the increasing registration of live births at the borderline of viability (eg, birth weight 8