Fostering Reproductive Resilience to Climate and Environmental Change

I have no financial disclosures.

And what I'd like to talk about in this brief session this evening is really how climate change and petrochemicals impact reproduction and pregnancy.

And so it's really gonna sort of be a bit of a whirlwind tour, but I'm gonna start with the science, how climate change impacts reproduction, and then a little bit on how climate change and chemicals intersect.

And then we'll delve into the concept of endocrine disruption on reproduction because understanding that concept is important to understand why there are certain chemicals that we worry about exposure to.

And then hopefully we'll spend a little bit more time going over some practical tips to reduce exposure to toxic chemicals and promoting resilience to climate change.

So starting with the basics, so again, my day job is taking care of high risk pregnancies.

And there's an extensive and growing body of literature suggesting that climate change carries particular risks for pregnancy.

And I'm not gonna have time to go into all of it, but just thinking about the basics, we know that high heat is dangerous for pregnant women.

So the normal physiology of pregnancy, the woman is breathing a lot more.

There's a 20% increase in oxygen consumption.

There's a 50% increase in how hard the heart is working in pregnancy.

And the fetus itself is generating heat.

So all these things together make the pregnant person more susceptible to high heat.

And when we look at health outcomes and pregnancy outcomes related to heat waves or extreme temperatures in general, we see shorter pregnancies and more preterm birth.

And preterm birth, it's an important contributor to children's health and certainly a major risk factor for death even in premature infants.

So this is something that's worth a lot of attention.

And so research from different parts of the world have shown that higher temperatures increase the risk of preterm birth.

And in general, it's thought that absolute higher temperatures may be worse, but that it's also a high temperature relative to what a community is used to because a community that is used to 90-degree weather is going to have air conditioning, hopefully, and is more sort of built around hotter temperatures as opposed to, say, a community like the west side of San Francisco where, you know, you're sort of expecting it to be cooler.

And if you have a relatively warm day, it feels like a hot day.

Other issues related to climate change in pregnancy with wildfire smoke, we also see an increased risk of preterm birth.

With floods, again, we see a risk of low birth weight and then even morbidity and mortality in babies who are born during or after floods.

So there are lots of ways that we can see climate change sort of directly impacting pregnancy.