How Rising Temperatures Due to Climate Change are Shortening Pregnancies

It’s bad enough that adults have made a climatological mess of the world. It’s worse that the mess is having a disproportionate impact on kids—who did nothing to create the problem, but are more susceptible to health issues caused by rising temperatures than adults are. Now, it appears, global warming is doing its damage even further down the human age spectrum. According to a new study published in Nature Climate Change, rising temperatures may have a direct impact on human gestational time, increasing the risk of early delivery. Babies are considered premature when they are born at 37 weeks or earlier. But delivery between 37 and 40 weeks is still not considered ideal, with late-term births correlated to lower birthweight and even potential cognitive development problems later in life. Many variables can cause an otherwise healthy pregnancy to come to term earlier than it should—one is extreme heat. To study this effect, Alan Barreca, an associate professor at UCLA’s Institute of Environmental Sustainability, and economist Jessamyn Schaller of Claremont McKenna College, analyzed daily temperature and county-by-county birth rates across the U.S. in a two-decade window from 1969 to 1988. That is an admittedly old dataset, but the researchers had little choice. “In 1989, the vital statistics system started to be more cautious about information it allowed out publicly in order to make it hard to identify individuals precisely by place or dat...
Source: TIME: Science - Category: Science Authors: Tags: Uncategorized birth climate change Environment gestation health Labor Pregnancy Source Type: news