Classifying perinatal death: fetal and neonatal factors.

It has been common practice in the United Kingdom for more than 30 years to classify perinatal deaths according to the maternal condition that initiated the events that led to death. However, such an approach tends to ignore the baby as an individual in his or her own right. The need for an additional classification that identifies the pathological processes occurring in the baby in every perinatal death has long been recognized, and the classification adopted in the 1958 British Perinatal Mortality Survey has now been revised with this need in mind.