Natural Disasters and Pregnancy: Population-Level Stressors and Interventions

Global climate change is resulting in more frequent, and increasingly severe, natural disasters that affect large populations. Disasters have a measurable effect on the physical and mental health of citizens, including pregnant women. In addition to increasing the pregnant woman’s risk of postpartum depression, prenatal (and perhaps even preconception) exposure to population-level disasters appears to program the unborn child in ways that could compromise long-term well-being. Although there are many options for dealing with stress in individual women going through punctual life events, such as the death of a family member, such individual-level interventions could not feasibly be applied to hundreds or thousands of perinatal women in the wake of a natural disaster that disrupts the functioning of an entire community.