As the world warms up, there is a growing amount of evidence that the heat is interfering with pregnancy, perturbing the delicate fetus in the womb, with the potential for serious complications.
of an unseasonal California heat wave last late spring, Nathaniel DeNicola, an obstetrician-gynecologist at Hoag Hospital in Newport Beach, had an unusual case on his hands: A patient who had been carrying a perfectly healthy pregnancy for 32 weeks was going into early labor. It didn’t make sense; nevertheless, the baby was coming. The patient’s waters had broken, the baby’s heartbeat was dropping fast, and the child was in the breech position. The mother had an emergency C-section.
After the scramble to deliver the baby, DeNicola searched for reasons that might explain the premature arrival. Sometimes there are obvious causes for the early rupturing of membranes, like ainfection or a condition called cervical insufficiency, in which the cervix starts to dilate on its own. But those explanations didn’t fit DeNicola’s patient. Struggling, he settled on a different explanation: the searing heat.
Doctors have known for some time that certain groups of people, like the elderly and children, are particularly vulnerable to. But in recent years, a new population has come into focus: pregnant people and their unborn babies. As the world warms up, there is a growing corpus of evidence that the heat is interfering with pregnancy, perturbing the delicate fetus in the womb, with the potential for serious complications.
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