Dec. 9, 2020
When President Trump banned travel from seven Muslim-majority countries as one of his first executive orders in 2017, fears of family separation and disrupted refugee resettlement were widespread. But few people were sounding the alarm about its potential impact on birth outcomes.
Now, research suggests that the stress associated with the travel ban increased preterm births for women from those seven countries. A study from the Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health found that women from the impacted countries living in the United States saw an almost 7 percent increase in their chances of delivering preterm from September 2017 to August 2018. White women born in the United States saw no change in their odds of having a preterm birth during the same period, which started eight months after the ban.