Rh in Marriage

A new factor has been added to the marital equation. It is the Rh factor in human blood, discovered in 1940 and so named because famed Blood Analysts Karl Landsteiner and Alexander Solomon Wiener used rhesus monkeys in their early experiments. Exactly what the factor is, doctors still do not know, but they have devised tests to determine who is Rh-positive and who is Rh-negative, and have found that the Rh factor sometimes complicates blood transfusion. Last week Dr. Enrique Eduardo Ecker of Cleveland's Western Reserve University advocated premarital tests for the factor. Reason: an Rh-negative woman married to an Rh-positive man may never have children.

When such a woman conceives an Rh-positive child, there is a 1-in-30 chance that the child's blood may create a dangerous reaction in the mother's blood --with the result that the child, if it lives to be born, will have a dangerous disease called erythroblastosis fetalis, character ized by anemia and jaundice.

About 15% of U.S. men & women are Rh-negative and about 10% of marriages are in the danger zone. Some 5,000 babies with erythroblastosis fetalis are born alive each year, and 5,000 more are born dead.

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