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Hot weather increases pregnant women’s risk of giving birth early, and more babies could be born early as a result of global warming, researchers report today (December 2) in Nature Climate Change. The average reduction in gestational length is six days, they find.
“Increased exposure to hot weather with climate change is likely to harm infant health,” write coauthors Alan Barreca, an economist at the University of California, Los Angeles, and Jessamyn Schaller, an economist at Claremont McKenna College, in the study. That’s because early birth is tied to poorer physical and mental health later in life.
Reviewing county birth rates around the time of extreme heat waves in the United States from 1969 to 1988, the researchers estimated that roughly 25,000 infants per year were born earlier than their due dates as a result of heat exposure, and that the heat led to the loss ...
