Jul 23, 2026 · 29 min · 11 segments
Climate and environmental change affect reproductive health and pregnancy in important ways. Dr. Marya Zlatnik explains how petrochemicals, climate change, and everyday chemical exposures can shape…
Marya ZlatnikGuestHost / ModeratorHost
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 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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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