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Millions of women can be forgiven if they feel like they've been made unwilling participants in an experiment, an experiment to find out what happens when you are pregnant in a pandemic. There's still a lot we don't know about pregnancy and the coronavirus. NPR's Laurel Wamsley reports on what is known.
LAUREL WAMSLEY, BYLINE: Carissa Helmer and her husband Timothy had been trying for a few months to get pregnant when the coronavirus came along. They thought maybe they'd put their plan to start a family on hold.
CARISSA HELMER: There's this whole quarantine going on. We don't want to be putting the baby at risk. Also, our jobs are uncertain right now. So we thought, oh, maybe we won't try for a few months.
WAMSLEY: But then her pregnancy test came back positive.
HELMER: We were like, oh, well, I guess it's too late for that.
WAMSLEY: For Helmer, there have been some conveniences to being pregnant during quarantine. She's been able to work from home, so she gets more sleep, and she was able to manage her morning sickness by having crackers and ginger ale, something she can't do on her 90-minute Metro commute from the suburbs of D.C. into the city. But other aspects of the pregnancy have been tougher because of the virus. For one thing, she's had to go to all of her doctor's appointments by herself, and she's had to tell relatives to quarantine for 14 days before they visit. Helmer says she's very worried about getting the coronavirus.
HELMER: Yeah, I'm very terrified. I mean, my husband's still going to the grocery store, and that's pretty much the only place that he goes. And the only place that I go is the doctor's office.
WAMSLEY: Doctors say an abundance of caution is the right approach. Last month, the CDC published a study that suggested pregnant women are more likely to get a severe case of COVID-19 compared to other women with the disease. Laura Riley is an OB-GYN who's on the COVID-19 task force at the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists.
LAURA RILEY: All along, we've been saying you need to take every precaution that you possibly can to protect yourself and your family from contracting COVID-19.
WAMSLEY: Pregnant women with COVID-19 appear to be more likely to go into ICUs or on ventilators, according to the CDC. But their data had a lot of gaps, and the number of pregnant women in the study who needed a ventilator was quite small - just half of 1%. The data reinforces the need for pregnant women to do all the things that we know work - social distancing, wearing facial coverings and washing hands frequently. And it's critical that others in their households do the same, Riley says.
RILEY: And then the other thing is that if they have symptoms or if you're - if you think you've been exposed, it's important to let us know so that we can do the test, figure out whether or not you've had it or have it or whatever the case may be.
WAMSLEY: One big question is whether the virus can be transmitted in utero. Doctors in France reported that a newborn caught the coronavirus before birth, via the placenta, but that appears to be extremely rare. The CDC also found that Black and Hispanic pregnant women appear to be disproportionately affected by the virus.
Carroll Medeiros is an OB-GYN in Providence, R.I., who treats many Black and Hispanic patients. She says that while some pregnant women can work from home right now, that's simply not an option for many of her patients, who work in health care, factories or retail. For them, the pandemic makes everything harder in part because their job might expose them to the virus.
CARROLL MEDEIROS: It's hard for them to take off time when they feel like they are most at risk. You take off time, you might lose your job.
WAMSLEY: But, she says, she hasn't seen many indications that people who want to get pregnant are avoiding it.
MEDEIROS: People have come to have their intrauterine devices removed and to start trying. I don't think it's deterred anybody.
WAMSLEY: Maybe, Medeiros says, it's that people have a certain kind of hope for the future.
Laurel Wamsley, NPR News.
(SOUNDBITE OF TRACEY CHATTAWAY'S "EARLY LIGHT") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
