Trump's Election Tied To Premature Birth Spike In NYC Study

NEW YORK — President Donald Trump's anti-immigrant rhetoric and policies may have caused New York City's Latina moms so much stress that they saw increase in premature births, a new city-backed study shows.

The Department of Health and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health examined the frequency of pre-term births among women of different ethnicities and nationalities in the months leading up to Trump winning the Republican nomination and following his 2017 inauguration.

The pre-term birth rate among Latina women born in Mexico or Central America jumped significantly to 8.4 percent after the inauguration from 7.3 percent leading up to the GOP convention, says the study published Wednesday in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health.

"This analysis highlights how the stress caused by racism and discrimination may induce preterm births, which are extremely harmful to both mothers and babies," Dr. Oxiris Barbot, the city's acting health commissioner, said in a statement. "Every woman in this city has the right to have a healthy pregnancy and delivery regardless of their race or immigration status."

The study examined the rates of pre-term births — when a baby is born after less than 37 weeks of pregnancy — from September 2015 through August 2017.

That time frame saw Trump push for a wall along the southern U.S. border and a ban on Muslims entering the country; refer to immigrants as "bad hombres"; and claim there were "fine people on both sides" of a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Researchers hypothesized that groups targeted by "anti-immigrant, anti-Hispanic and anti-Muslim rhetoric, policies and violence" would more likely see an increase in pre-term births after Trump's inauguration.

An increase in "sociopolitical stressors" and hate crimes in the 2016 election's aftermath may have contributed to the spike in premature births among "targeted populations" such as Hispanic women, according to the study.

Premature births increased among Latina women overall, but the impact was most acute for those born in foreign countries with Mexican or Central American ancestry, the study found. Women from the Middle East, North Africa and the countries targeted by Trump's so-called travel ban saw a smaller spike.

The rate among white women, by contrast, barely budged after the inauguration and actually decreased very slightly for those born in the U.S., according to the study. The city's overall pre-term birth rate increased slightly to 7.3 percent after the inauguration from 7 percent in the earlier part of Trump's campaign.

Premature births were most common among black women at a rate of 10.6 percent in the month's after Trump's inauguration, up slightly from 10.2 percent early in his campaign, the study shows.

"The study results point to the importance of monitoring the health impacts of severe sociopolitical stressors and changing exposure to these stressors, as has occurred for groups targeted during the 2016 presidential election and its aftermath," said Dr. Nancy Krieger, a Harvard professor of social epidemiology who was the study's lead author.

(Lead image: President Donald Trump is pictured on Oct. 17, 2018. Photo by Chip Comodevilla/Getty Images)