Violence Threatens Health of Pregnant Women
& Newborns, Study Finds
August 17,
2006
A new study demonstrates conclusively that physical abuse by
husbands and boyfriends compromises a woman’s health during pregnancy, her
likelihood of carrying a child to term and the health of her newborn.
A
Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH) study, published in the July 2006 issue
of the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology, finds that violence
from male partners both in the year prior to and during a woman’s pregnancy
harms the health of women during pregnancy and the health of newborn children,
and increases the risk of serious health complications during pregnancy. Abuse
also increases a woman’s risk of delivering prematurely and having a child who
is born clinically underweight and in need of intensive care.
Led by Jay
Silverman, PhD, Assistant Professor of Society, Human Development and Health at
the HSPH, and Anita Raj, PhD, Associate Professor of Social and Behavioral
Sciences at Boston University School of Public Health, researchers examined data
on more than 118,000 women in 26 states who gave birth to live infants from 2000
to 2003. Information was gleaned from the Pregnancy Risk Assessment Monitoring
System, which gathers information from women around the time of pregnancy.
They found that women experiencing abuse in the year prior to and/or
during a recent pregnancy were 40 percent to 60 percent more likely than
non-abused women to report high-blood pressure, vaginal bleeding, severe nausea,
kidney or urinary tract infections and hospitalization during pregnancy.
Abused women also were 37 percent more likely to deliver preterm, and
children of abused women were 17 percent more likely to be born underweight.
Both of these conditions pose grave health risks to newborns. Children born to
abused mothers were more than 30 percent more likely than other children to
require intensive care upon birth.
The study did not examine the impact
of emotional abuse.
Silverman offered several possible explanations for
the poor health outcomes. “It may be that stress resulting from abuse is having
a negative impact on the reproductive endocrine system and leading to poor
outcomes during pregnancy,” he said. “Depression, known to result from abuse,
has been shown to negatively affect fetal development. Sexual assault commonly
co-occurs with physical violence from male partners and may lead to both greater
risk of bleeding and urinary tract infections. Also, sexually transmitted
infections are significantly more common among women abused by male partners,
and such infections are known to compromise health during pregnancy and fetal
development.”
“We need to conduct far more research in this area to
understand the mechanisms at work,” Silverman added. “But regardless of the
mechanisms, it is clear that abuse from husbands and boyfriends represents a
serious risk to the health of women, their pregnancies, and their newborn
children… As a society, we cannot afford to allow prevention of this grave
threat to so many mothers and children to remain a low public health priority.”
The HSPH study was supported by a grant from the Division of
Reproductive Health of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Michele
R. Decker, MPH, and Elizabeth Reed, MPH, both of the HSPH, co-authored the
Journal article on the findings.
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