The Society of Environmental Journalists on April 26 brought together reporters covering pregnancy risks related to climate change during its annual conference.
Virginia Gewin, a freelance science journalist, worked with Environmental Protection Agency researchers and doulas to find evidence that mothers in extreme heat environments were giving birth to more preterm babies.
“There was a whole spate of scientific articles within the last five plus years that were from different regions, all over the country, all over the world, and they were all showing the exact same thing,” Gewin said.
Babies born prematurely are vulnerable to a host of health complications.
Here are more takeaways from the conversation.
Natural disasters impact the careful timing of reproductive care
Reproductive care is dependent on hormones and can be timed down to the hour, which can be easily disrupted by natural disasters.
Hurricane and other natural disasters have also closed abortion clinics, preventing women from accessing them before their state’s gestational cutoff for having an abortion, said Jessica Kutz, climate and gender reporter for The 19th, a nonprofit reporting on gender, politics and public policy.
Kurtz offered an example connected to Hurricane Ian, which hit Florida in September 2022.
“This couple who had suffered several miscarriages, and finally they turned to IVF,” said Kutz. “The day before they were supposed to go in for their final appointment, the hurricane closed their clinic.”
Climate change likely to put more women at risk during pregnancy
Climate change models predict that infectious diseases will spread more rapidly as the Earth warms.
Because pregnant women are especially vulnerable to disease, warming is likely to put more people at greater risk.
This had been acknowledged in federal reports, but the link between pregnancy risks and climate change requires further coverage, said Zoya Teirstein, who moderated the panel and is a staff writer for Grist, a nonprofit dedicated to climate change journalism.
“The immune system stands down in order to allow the fetus to grow without getting rejected by the body,” Teirstein said.
People in poverty may be less concerned with reproductive health care
Jenae Barnes, a health journalist for Capital B, which produces news for Black communities nationwide, said she observed that people facing economic hardship in her Gary, Indiana, were less concerned with reproductive health and the environment.
“When people are worried about how they’re going to pay their extremely high utility bills because it’s getting hotter and colder, they’re not so much worried about how much air pollution that they’re breathing in,” Barnes said.
Disappearing public health data means more voices needed
Many public health databases have been maintained by the federal government, including by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Environmental Protection Agency.
But all panelists said they had encountered a database being removed from public access since the start of the Trump administration.
Barnes said that although the data may be unavailable, the people experiencing the underlying challenges remain.
“While the data might be being erased, the people are still here,” said Barnes.
Sophia Ramirez is a senior at Arizona State University and is part of a student newsroom led by The Arizona Republic.
Coverage of the Society of Environmental Journalists conference is supported by Arizona State University’s Cronkite School of Journalism, the University of Arizona, the Nina Mason Pulliam Charitable Trust and the Arizona Media Association.
These stories are published open-source for other news outlets and organizations to share and republish, with credit and links to azcentral.com.
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