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U.S. immigration enforcement is taking a toll on Dr. Daisy León-Martínez’s patients. The California OB-GYN primarily cares for Latina-identifying pregnant people and those with a Spanish-language preference.
In the months since President Donald Trump began his mass deportation campaign, some of her patients’ partners have been detained by immigration officials or were removed from the country, she said. Others have left their jobs out of fear of being identified. Some are too scared to travel to essential prenatal and specialist appointments.
“They don’t feel safe in their communities any longer,” León-Martínez told Rewire News Group. “This is leading people to feel afraid to leave their homes, which, in and of itself, is a very stressful situation.”
Stress is bad for human health, and that’s particularly true during pregnancy. As the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement raids continue to expand to include both new cities and more violent tactics, medical providers and public health experts are growing more concerned about maternal “weathering” — the increasingly supported theory that the chronic stress from discrimination causes health decline.
Coupled with accounts of patients who are delaying or avoiding essential prenatal and birthing care, experts worry pregnant people who feel targeted by the administration’s actions — including documented immigrants whose race, jobs, or neighborhood expose them to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) — and their developing fetuses will face more complications before, during, and after birth.
León-Martínez, who specializes in high-risk care, said some of her patients with no history of anxiety or depression in previous pregnancies are now experiencing “severe symptoms,” like disrupted sleep, heart palpitations, chest pains, and depression, that make caring for themselves and their children nearly impossible. She added that some patients are “requiring significant care,” including hospitalization, as a result.
“That tells me that these policies are having very deep effects on our patients,” she said.
How Chronic Stress Impacts Pregnancy, Newborns
The concept of maternal weathering dates back to the early 1990s, when public health researcher Arline Geronimus hypothesized that the stress of being exposed to racism, discrimination, and systemic inequality over time could explain why researchers were seeing better birth outcomes in younger Black women compared to those who were older.
Since then, decades of research have linked stress to poor maternal health outcomes.
People who experience higher levels of stress in pregnancy are at greater risk of developing conditions like preeclampsia, a pregnancy complication characterized by high blood pressure, and pre-term birth, where a pregnant person delivers before 37 weeks’ of pregnancy, León-Martínez said. Research has also linked stress in pregnancy to low birth weight in infants.
Those outcomes can be serious for both infants and their parents, experts said.