The number of women going through pregnancy without prenatal care is growing — even though the overall number of babies born in the U.S. is falling, according to a new report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The lopsided trend, published Tuesday by the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics , may reflect, in part, a growing number of women unable to access OB/GYN care after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v.
Wade in 2022. “In many counties, you can’t even find a prenatal care provider,” said Dr. Brenna Hughes, executive vice chair of the department of obstetrics and gynecology at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina.
“If you have limited resources and have to travel to be able to access prenatal care, it is going to be a deterrent.” The percentage of mothers without any prenatal care rose from 2.2% in 2022 to 2.
3% in 2023, the CDC’s analysis of birth certificates found. Even that slight increase could be detrimental to the health of both mom and baby , said Dr. Kathryn Lindley, a cardio-obstetrician at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville, Tennessee.
“There’s a lot of baby monitoring that goes on during pregnancy to help us identify any potential health problems,” such as birth defects or unusually high blood pressure, she said. “High blood pressure related to pregnancy can lead to serious illness or death by causing complications like strokes or seizures or heart attacks,” Lindley said. “It’s real.