It has been said that "America values group judgment." For this reason I have pooled the combined views of the pediatric and obstetric staffs of the University of Nebraska College of Medicine and have incorporated the evidence obtained from other teaching centers in this discussion. Neonatal (first month of life) deaths approximate 70,000 annually. In 1941, the last year for which statistics are now available, fetal and neonatal deaths aggregated 144,692. This is more than the number of deaths occurring among individuals in the age group of 5 to 29 years (99,610) and is 10.4 per cent of the total deaths for all ages and all causes (1,397,642).1Since 1937 the infant and neonatal death rates have been declining, although the actual number of stillbirths and neonatal deaths have increased because of the increase in births from 2,203,337 in 1937 to 2,513,427 in 1941. According to Potter and Adair