COVID infection endangers pregnancies and newborns. Why aren't parents being warned?

From conception to birth, COVID infections increase risks to parent and baby. Prenatal education is ignoring it.

In the movie Knocked Up, Seth Rogan’s character refers to the book What to Expect When You’re Expecting as “basically a giant list of things you can't do.” It’s a line that pokes fun at the seemingly ever-expanding list of foods, behaviors and hazards that pregnant people are encouraged to avoid in order to reduce health risks to themselves and their babies.

Despite pre-natal education’s reputation for warning new mothers of every possible danger from jumping on trampolines to eating soft cheeses, contracting a vascular virus that increases risk of pre-eclampsia, pre-term birth, miscarriage and stillbirth is being ignored. Let’s look at the evidence.

Risks to Pregnancy

Studies demonstrating the harm of COVID in pregnancy are thick on the ground; I’ll discuss just a few.

As reported in Forbes, a 2023 Lancet study found that:

SARS-CoV-2 infections during pregnancy are associated with placental lesions from vascular malperfusion, which can result in increased rates of fetal growth restriction, pre-labor membrane rupture, and miscarriage.

A study published in Placenta in 2023 begins by stating “we deduced that COVID-19 pregnancies were oxygen deficient, which could further result in other pregnancy-related complications like preeclampsia and IUGR.”

From a 2023 study published in the Journal of Personalized Medicine:

As the COVID-19 pandemic continues into its third year, there is accumulating evidence on the consequences of maternal infection. Emerging data indicate increased obstetrics risks, including maternal complications, preterm births, impaired intrauterine fetal growth, hypertensive disorders, stillbirth, gestational diabetes, and a risk of developmental defects in neonates.

As reported by CIDRAP, a large study published in JAMA Network Open found that “SARS-CoV-2 infection is tied to increased preterm birth (PTB), high blood pressure during pregnancy, and severe maternal morbidity.”

Another 2023 study found that pregnant women who tested positive for COVID on a PCR were more likely to develop preeclampsia/eclampsia, more likely to need a C-section, and more likely to experience a postpartum hemorrhage, among other risks.

In summary, a wide array of studies find an increased risk of high blood pressure, gestational diabetes, pre-term birth, miscarriage, low birth weight, birth defects and more in women who contract COVID while pregnant.

However, like other medical specialties, OB/GYNs often downplay or ignore risks entirely. A 2022 analysis found that the prevalence of gestational diabetes increased by almost 40% since COVID at a single academic center, with the study reporting that:

Delivery during the pandemic remained a significant predictor of gestational diabetes when controlling for maternal age, prepregnancy BMI and gestational weight gain.

In the reporting about this study on Healio, one of the study authors, herself an OB student, states, “This emphasizes the importance of appropriate antenatal counseling on healthy diet and lifestyle….This also spurs the question of what exactly may be causing these increased rates, whether it is COVID-19 directly or the effects of the quarantine.”

The doctor’s own study found that the pandemic was a predictor of gestational diabetes when controlling for pre-pregnancy BMI and weight gain, yet her question seems to indicate that she is more concerned about “healthy diet” than the variable that actually spiked diabetes rates. (COVID has been shown to spike your risk of diabetes generally, by the way.)

This tendency to blame “lockdowns” for clear post-COVID health effects continues to weaken public support for necessary public health interventions and disease mitigations generally. Only two major changes can be responsible for ongoing post-COVID health effects; when you minimize the effects of COVID, you throw vaccines, isolation guidelines, and masks under the bus as the only alternative explanation for the harm we’re seeing at a population level, intentionally or not.

It’s important to note that study after study finds that all of the above risks are reduced by COVID-19 vaccination. This information is particularly important to highlight given the tendency for COVID minimizers and denialists to attribute harm to vaccines and other interventions (masks, lockdowns). However, reduced risk does not mean zero risk; no one would encourage a pregnant mom to contract any other virus due to her vaccination status, nor are other risk factors with less potential for poor outcomes ignored.

And the risks of COVID exposure don’t end when babies are born. Babies exposed to COVID both before and after birth are at risk for a wide array of negative health outcomes and cannot be vaccinated before 6 months of age (although maternal vaccination does reduce risk to babies somewhat, with the linked study finding a 35% reduced risk of hospitalization for infants with COVID-vaccinated mothers).

Risks to Babies

One of the persistent myths of the pandemic has been that COVID is harmless to kids; this myth is itself false as we can see in the many cases of Long COVID in children, and the fact that COVID is a leading cause of death in children, killing more kids in the US annually than any other infectious disease. The falsehood of COVID’s harmlessness to kids has somehow transformed into the even more inaccurate idea that “therefore COVID is harmless to unborn and newborn babies”.

In fact, infants are six times more likely to be hospitalized for a COVID infection than other children under five, and have had the second highest hospitalization rate after seniors above 65 during the Omicron waves. After declining each year since 2007, infant mortality in the US increased from 2020 to 2021, and from 2021 to 2022, 2% and 3% respectively. [Note: data from 2023 is not yet available.] Both respiratory distress deaths (up 11% in 2022) and bacterial sepsis deaths (up 14% in 2022)- which can be brought on by COVID infections- have increased significantly.

When health guidance instructs that vulnerable groups should “make their own risk assessments,” babies under 6 months old are some of the people being empowered with personal health decisions rather than collective disease mitigations.

Parents have been advised to keep newborn babies at home for many decades prior to COVID. Babies are notoriously susceptible to infections. Historically, nearly half of children died before reaching adulthood, with under 5s being the most vulnerable subset, and new babies being more vulnerable yet. Protecting newborns was something we treated as common knowledge prior to COVID normalization policies. From a 2011 WebMD article titled “Protecting Your Baby From Other People's Germs”:

Keep in mind that germs like cold and flu viruses that are pretty benign in adults can cause problems in young babies. For that …. parents should be very careful to protect their babies from germs in the first three months -- and if possible, the first six.

Now, with a much deadlier virus circulating year-round at sky-high rates, there seems to be little communication to parents and the public at large about disease mitigation around babies. Additionally, during the pre-pandemic era, viruses like the flu and colds were thought to be spread via droplets, meaning that we believed viral particles would quickly fall to the ground rather than hang in the air. Now that we know they are fully airborne, health recommendations should be updated to reflect the reality of airborne transmission, meaning mask wearing for individuals, and clean air at the population level.

Both pre-natal exposure and exposure after birth are damaging to infants and carry an assortment of risks, including respiratory problems, delayed development, and more.

A 2022 study published in The Lancet found that “fetal lung volume was significantly reduced” in babies born to mothers who had mild COVID infections during their pregnancy. Infection prior to birth carries longer term risks to kids. Another recent study published in Nature Communications and covered at NBC News found that:

Babies born to mothers who had Covid during pregnancy had "unusually high rates" of respiratory distress at birth or shortly thereafter…The authors defined respiratory distress as having at least two out of four symptoms: a slow breathing rate, pale or bluish skin, flaring nostrils or a retraction of the chest with each breath.

Yet another looked at “whether SARS-CoV-2 exposure during pregnancy impacted the longer-term development and breathing of babies, and whether they suffered more health problems than children who were not exposed.” From an article published by University of Leicester:

The team found that overall development at two years of age did not differ between the children who were exposed and not-exposed to SARS-CoV-2. However, on a group level, the exposed cohort were at greater risk of slightly delayed social-emotional development. 

Importantly, children exposed to the virus in the perinatal period also had more problems with breathing and used health care services more, including more inpatient, outpatient and GP attendances by two years of age when compared with the non-exposed cohort.

In other words, kids who were exposed to COVID before birth were still using more healthcare services at age 2.

A 2022 Trends in Molecular Medicine study of fetal brain development states that “given the potential for profound maternal immune activation (MIA), impact on the developing fetal brain is likely.” A 2024 study looking at pregnancies between 2022-2023 (the post-vaccine period) found that COVID infection significantly increased risk of fetal situs inversus, a rare birth defect that causes organs to be mirror-image transposed and is linked to congenital heart defects. Yet another 2024 study found impaired cardiac function in babies whose mothers contracted COVID in the second trimester. I could go on.

In summary, ongoing research finds a wide array of impacts on infant development when contracted in the womb or shortly after birth.

---

We’ve established that contracting SARS-COV-2 is a risk to both pregnancy and infant. So, are we seeing OBs recommend that pregnant women wear masks? Are we seeing parents being told to keep newborn infants home because of the unending COVID soup we find ourselves stewing in? Are family members of new parents being instructed to wear masks in public spaces so they don’t give new babies a COVID infection?

Like much of the medical industry, prenatal care is largely ignoring COVID. The topics listed on the CDC’s “During Pregnancy” page include: folic acid, vaccines, cigarettes, alcohol, cannabis, safer food choices, STIs, toxoplasmosis, HIV and West Nile. Not a word about the leading infectious disease cause of death in the US, an entire section on West Nile, of which there were a whopping 2,406 cases total in 2023.

The reason health bodies and therefore many medical professionals try to bury, ignore, and minimize COVID are political, psychological and social.

Politically, governments decided to sell a “we beat the pandemic” narrative to the public after vaccines failed to produce herd immunity as promised. For this reason, political health bodies like the CDC began putting out guidance from the very top encouraging people to accept the “new normal” of unending reinfections. Acceptance of constant reinfections relies heavily on the perception that COVID infections are a truly neutral event for your health- something that no research, and no study, has ever concluded.

In the winter of 2021, the CDC reduced the COVID isolation period at the behest of the CEO of Delta Airlines, who couldn’t keep flights staffed adequately due to high levels of illness. Since then, they body has continued to ignore science in favor of political and economic considerations; our current isolation period is “one day if you want to,” something that does not accord with any science about COVID transmission, but does accomplish the CDC’s political goal of forcing sick people back to work.

Bodies like HICPAC- the infection control advisory body to the CDC- continue to put out infection control guidelines that do not control COVID infections, while resorting to ever-more bewildering excuses for letting COVID run rampant in hospitals. (“We can’t mandate masks because people won’t wear them” is an actual consideration, ignoring that both handwashing and glove-wearing protocols took years if not decades to achieve full adherence, and that infection control guidance is not supposed to pander to people who don’t want to do infection control).

Similarly, the WHO’s self-contradicting document about airborne transmission released earlier this year both finally acknowledges that COVID is fully airborne, then encourages healthcare settings to make their own decisions about whether or not they feel like implementing airborne infection control, and, ya know, controlling infections.

All of this produces tremendous top-down pressure on medical practitioners to view COVID as mild and even a health-neutral event. If infection control experts and disease control bodies are encouraging medical professionals to allow COVID to spread in healthcare settings, the moral injury to doctors and nurses watching patients get infected is immense. That is, unless COVID is not bad for you and cannot harm you. This is where psychological and social motivations come into play.

Even politically motivated bodies like the CDC and WHO have never come out and said that COVID is not harmful for vulnerable groups. In fact, their normalizing propaganda relies on the offloading of harmful effects on to a perma-outgroup, “the vulnerable,” which expands to admit anyone who develops Long COVID or is otherwise harmed by COVID. According to their own logic, the tens of thousands of preventable deaths of COVID last year were all of “vulnerable” people. Wouldn’t it then follow that vulnerable people, like pregnant women and infants, should then be the most protected, with more mitigations and safety measures?

Sadly, this is where the CDC’s self-contradicting logic collapses in on itself. Hospital settings, where vulnerable people have to exist amidst uncontrolled COVID, create cognitive dissonance for observers. According to “back to normal,” everyone can simply make their own risk calculations every day when they leave home. Using the handy government data that continues to be stripped away and is based on tests people can no longer access, vulnerable people are supposed to make educated guesses about how likely they are to be killed by entering a public space each morning. But in a hospital, suddenly this entire concept- vulnerable people can just totally isolate themselves from everyone else in society- completely falls apart. The CDC, HICPAC, and WHO guidance doesn’t protect vulnerable people at all from infections in healthcare.

The reality is that if there are no airborne infection control protocols in place and COVID is spreading at high levels throughout society, you’re likely to get exposed to COVID in a healthcare setting. Instead of doing that mental math and thinking “hey, if COVID harms people, maybe it’s a good idea to get the unmitigated spread of COVID under control in society as a whole,” many medical professionals do the mental math the other way: “if unmitigated spread is being allowed in society as a whole, it must be that COVID doesn’t harm people.”

Pregnant people and newborn babies are vulnerable members of our society, just like elderly people. The difference is that the eugenics-first campaign to abandon vulnerable people to infections prefers to use elderly people as its poster children, because the public is more easily convinced to allow elderly people to be harmed. Disabled people are also better sacrificial lambs for the “back to normal” campaign, which likes to claim that only those who “deserve” to be harmed will be harmed by unmitigated disease spread. Because of widespread ableism, much of the public is okay with being told that their behaviors are killing old and disabled people. But as it turns out, no one really likes to think about their behavior as harming newborn infants and pregnant people. Therefore, our collective approach to addressing this harm, from doctors to family members, is to pretend it isn’t happening.

Once health practitioners and family members start to understand the importance of mitigating COVID for newborn babies, mightn’t they start to demand a better public response to disease spread than “let it rip”? Mightn’t they stop to think about the reality that COVID is not, as we’ve been encouraged to believe, completely inevitable and completely harmless?

Unfortunately, the widespread reluctance to even speak the word “COVID” leaves expectant parents out of the loop as they attempt to navigate their “personal risk assessments” during pregnancy. Pregnant people deserve honest information about the risks of COVID infection, as well as education about how best to avoid infections and mitigate risks. And the public deserves to know that our instructions to allow the vulnerable to “fall by the wayside” includes newborn babies.