Record Temps Are Killing Women and Babies

As the world comes off the hottest summer ever recorded, researchers are feverishly studying the devastating effects of heat on the body. Globally, men and women face different health challenges in high temperatures, partly because of societal structures — who is working where, inside or out? — and partly because of basic physical differences, with women carrying children.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention say that high heat increases a woman’s chance of bearing a child with birth defects. Being pregnant makes you more likely to dehydrate, the CDC writes, and it increases your probability of having heat stroke or heat exhaustion — pregnant women’s bodies have to cool both mother and child. Dehydration means a lack of sweating, which would allow the body to cool down. Pregnant women are also at a greater risk for more miscarriages.

And make no mistake: This extreme heat is due to man-made climate change. “While it is difficult to tie particular natural disasters to climate change,” writes the U.S.-based nonprofit the Climate Impact Lab, “heat waves are the events scientists can most easily and robustly attribute to man-made changes in the atmosphere.”

Life in the Hottest Place on Earth

Nowhere in the world has had sustained extreme heat like in Pakistan and India. Not only have the temperatures been extraordinarily high, the humidity has made everything worse. The human body can only endure wet-bulb temperatures (those adjusted for humidity) in the high 80s or low 90s. Jacobabad, in southeastern Pakistan, has been called “the hottest city on earth,” having hit 123.8 degrees Fahrenheit on May 14. The city has also passed the survivable wet-bulb temperature at least four times.

Last year, in a village just outside Jacobabad, a woman named Fazeela Mumtaz Bhatti, 46, passed out while preparing breakfast for her husband and their 11 children.

“Bhatti — who was otherwise healthy — had made a bit of potato and charred bread, working in a poorly ventilated brick room on an open fire fueled by dung patties,” The Washington Post reported.

Women in the village quickly moved Bhatti onto a string cot and covered her with water.

“She was fire to the touch,” Naheed, one of Bhatti’s daughters, said. “She just kept saying, ‘Don’t you worry about anything, I’ll be okay. Just make sure your father and siblings are fed.’”

Bhatti died en route to the hospital.

A doctor at the Jacobabad Institute of Medical Sciences, Kamala Bakht, told The Post that the number of low-birth-weight babies in the hospital’s feeding program has been rising since 2018 — from about 40 to 55 a month. The massive flooding in Pakistan in 2022 combined with extreme heat has had what Bakht called “a great impact” on her patients and their capacity to feed their babies.

In Sindh province, where Jacobabad lies, nurses and others said that there has been a rise in miscarriages, low-birth-weight babies, and a decreased production of breast milk. They attribute it all to the stress caused by the floods, as well as this summer’s extreme temperatures.

“Miscarriages have been increasing because of the intense heat,” said Zainab Hingoro, a local health care worker. When she once would have 3 out of 10 pregnant patients miscarry, she now has 5 to 6 out of 10, The Post reports. The number of low-birth-weight babies is also “drastically increasing.”

An Overlooked Problem in the U.S.

While the developing world is being hit hardest by rising temperatures (there are fewer resources to mitigate consequences), developed countries have their share of climate-related issues. One that involves women that is generally overlooked in the United States is how high heat affects birth control.

“Record heat waves across the country could threaten access to effective pregnancy tests, condoms, and emergency contraception pills,” writes the nonprofit newsroom The 19th. “Pregnancy tests generally should be stored at a temperature between 36 and 86 degrees Fahrenheit. Emergency contraception pills should be kept between 68 and 77 degrees, per the Food and Drug Administration, though they can be transported in temperatures ranging between 59 and 86 degrees.”

As states ­in some of the hottest parts of the country move to block abortion and access to contraception, the effects are particularly dire.

Even so, climate activists are much more likely to study heat waves for women in previously defined reproductive health areas.

“People aren’t thinking about the effects of extremely hot heat for all kinds of medical care,” Rachel Rebouché, dean at the Temple University School of Law, told The 19^th. “And, specific to reproductive health care, people aren’t thinking about condoms and contraception and reproductive health as essential health care.”