How COVID-19 can harm pregnancy and reproductive health

Severe outcomes are uncommon, but serious infections—or long COVID afterward—can endanger mothers and their babies.

Rather than risk a COVID-19 infection, many pregnant people have been choosing to deliver their babies in birthing centers or at home with a midwife, like the woman seen here. Early in the pandemic, hospitals overwhelmed with COVID-19 patients became hot zones for the coronavirus. By the summer and fall of 2020, obstetricians began seeing a spike in preterm births. “And then we started to see maternal deaths,” recalls David A. Schwartz, an Atlanta-based placental pathologist and epidemiologist. It was some of the earliest evidence that if a woman was infected SARS-CoV-2 in pregnancy, she was at risk for an adverse outcome.

Lisa O’Brien fell ill just after arriving home in Utah following a Hawaiian vacation in March 2020. She was among the earliest COVID-19 cases in her state. Though she didn’t land in the hospital, she’s never really recovered. Her heart beats with wild irregularity, she’s fatigued, she’s had blood clots. And even though she once had a clockwork-like menstrual cycle, she’s had only five periods in nearly two years. She was 42 when she got sick, so the change was surprising: She’s very young to be going through menopause.

After she launched a private Facebook group in June 2020—the Utah COVID-19 Long Haulers—she realized that many others also had lingering symptoms, a phenomenon now referred to as long COVID.

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