Response: Re: Pregnancy Care: An Apprenticeship for Palliative Care?

To the Editor: I appreciate the kind words of Dr. Christian Sinclair regarding my article “Pregnancy Care: An Apprenticeship for Palliative Care?” published in the Journal of the American Board of Family Medicine in January 2008.¹ In the months after the publication of the article, I received e-mails from physicians and nurses both within and outside the United States expressing appreciation for its content. Respondents included a nurse mid-wife educator from Israel who told me she planned to use the article to teach her mid-wife students. Her expressed intentions seem to give credence to Dr. Sinclair's observation that the article's content has broad applicability within health care education.

Although the practice of medicine has innumerable opportunities for meaningful communication, it is “these two sacred spaces”² of birth and death that deserve and demand the best of what we can give as compassionate and empathic physicians.