Raising the hourly minimum wage holds unexpected benefits for low-income pregnant women and their children, with increases as small as $1 helping to fend off events linked to poor health, researchers found.
Pregnant women in U.S. states that increased the minimum wage were less likely to encounter high-stress incidents — like being unable to pay bills — in the year before delivery, according to research published Tuesday in the JAMA Network Open medical journal. Other disruptive occurrences linked to poor maternal health, such the incarceration of a partner, were also less likely, according to the study of nearly 200,000 women across 39 states who gave birth between January 2004 and December 2015.
U.S. rates of pregnancy-related death more than doubled in the last 20 years, especially among minorities, according to a separate study published this month in JAMA that found Black women are more than twice as likely to die from pregnancy-related causes than their White peers. Women in low-income communities are also more vulnerable to events that magnify stress, even as simple as changing one’s address, that raise the risk for premature delivery, low birth weight, high blood pressure and pregnancy-related depression.
