Tag: pregnancy

COVID Vaccine in Early Pregnancy Led to Higher Rates of Two Birth Defects

A new study from Iran found that two rare birth defects — atrioventricular septal defects and cleft palate — occurred more often in infants whose mothers received an aluminum-containing COVID-19 vaccine during the first 12 weeks of pregnancy compared with mothers who received the vaccine later or not at all.

A new study from Iran found that two rare birth defects — atrioventricular septal defects (AVSD) and cleft palate — occurred more often in infants whose mothers received a COVID-19 vaccine during the first 12 weeks of pregnancy compared with mothers who received the vaccine later or not at all.

Unlike studies conducted in the U.S. and Europe, none of the women in the Iranian study received mRNA vaccines — however, all of the COVID-19 vaccines available in Iran contain 0.25-0.50 milligrams of aluminum adjuvant, Children’s Health Defense Senior Research Scientist Karl Jablonowski told The Defender.

Shots containing aluminum are not typically recommended for pregnant women in their first trimester, Jablonowski said.

Participants in the new study received either inactivated-virus or viral-vector COVID-19 vaccines. Researchers anonymized the specific vaccine brands “due to ethical and regulatory constraints.”

Other Iranian studies indicate that China’s Covilo, also known as Sinopharm, is the most commonly administered COVID-19 vaccine in Iran. That shot, Coviran Barkat, and the India-produced Covaxin were available in Iran at the time of the study.

The study, published last month in Sage Open Medicine, analyzed 1,352 pregnancies from two Iranian cities between 2022 and 2023.

Researchers compared three groups: 303 women who received no COVID-19 vaccine during pregnancy, 262 women who received at least one dose between conception and 11 weeks, 6 days of gestation — the window when fetal organs form — and 787 women vaccinated after the first trimester.

The authors said they were motivated by a gap in the research: COVID-19 vaccination is widely recommended for pregnant women worldwide, yet few studies have examined the link between early-pregnancy vaccination and birth defects.

“Research assessing whether these vaccines could influence embryonic development is crucial,” they wrote.

The authors cautioned that their findings are preliminary, based on small numbers of cases, and do not establish that vaccination caused the birth defects.

Jablonowski agreed that the study can’t establish causation but said it offers a starting point.

“It can generate hypotheses, and with this study, we’ve been handed a really good argument to start generating hypotheses,” particularly about vaccines that contain aluminum adjuvants.

Birth defects rare, but more common among women vaccinated in first trimester

Researchers evaluated birth defects detected during routine prenatal ultrasound examinations performed between 18 and 20 weeks of pregnancy between 2022 and 2023 among women in two major Iranian cities.

Demographic and pregnancy characteristics were relatively balanced across the groups, as were previous COVID-19 infection rates.

Although birth defects were uncommon overall, the researchers found that women vaccinated during the first trimester had babies who had them at higher rates.

Among the findings:

  • Six cases of AVSD, a congenital heart defect, occurred in the first trimester, compared with none in the unvaccinated group and one in the group of women who received the vaccine after the first trimester.
  • Two cases of cleft palate occurred among women vaccinated before 12 weeks, compared with no cases in either comparison group.

The study did not capture spontaneous abortions occurring before routine ultrasound screening, or pregnancies terminated before anomaly scans, the authors said.

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Academia Embarrasses Itself… Again

Over at Twitchy, a publication that curates the news in funny yet insightful ways, a headline reads, “Head of Medical School Tells Congresswoman the Vast Majority of Pregnancies Occur in Women.”  Sure enough, Twitchy is telling the truth.

During witness testimony before a congressional committee examining the impact of forced “diversity,” preferential (non-merit-based) admissions, and “woke” ideology upon the quality of medical schools, the chancellor of UC San Francisco testified under oath that not all pregnancies come from women.  That chancellor, Samuel Hawgood, is not some administrative bureaucrat with a made-up bachelor’s degree in the discriminatory effects of man-made “climate change” upon “transgender” Pakistanis (and an obligatory master’s in why American taxpayers must foot the bill for all “sex change” surgeries around the world).  No, Hawgood is an actual pediatrician who previously served as UCSF’s dean of the School of Medicine.  A man who did his residency at the Royal Women’s and Children’s Hospital in Brisbane cannot tell us how babies are made.

It is astounding to watch just how far down the propaganda rabbit hole so-called “institutions of higher learning” have dragged society.  Until very recently, this kind of public display of sophistry would have embarrassed an intellectual of the lowest order.  For a medical doctor and university chancellor to pretend that men can get pregnant is a flashing neon sign warning just how corrupt and dishonest all of academia has become.  These days, university leaders sound indistinguishable from North Korean spokespeople assuring starving citizens that they are better off than anyone else in the world.

How did we get to this point in time when professors tell rank lies to the American people, while hiding behind their titles as false evidence that those lies are somehow “truths”?  Well, social media favorite “Oilfield Rando” points to part of the problem.  In an X post responding to the doctor’s pseudoscientific testimony, Rando includes an itemization of Chancellor Hawgood’s university pay and accompanying benefits.  The man in charge of one of the country’s top educational institutions takes home well over a million dollars each year.  Unless Chancellor Hawgood is a moron who genuinely believes men can get pregnant, it is likely that he is willing to sell his intellectual reputation and personal honor for a seven-figure salary.

What does that say about the current state of our society?  The modern university arose from Christian monasteries dedicated to God’s truth.  This is why divinity degrees are generally accorded highest honor during processions accompanying graduation ceremonies.  As monasteries developed into secular institutions of higher learning, they remained places dedicated to the pursuit of truth.  Harvard’s motto, veritas, simply means “truth.”

For hundreds of years, faculty members did not take positions on college campuses because they sought fame or fortune.  They became scholars and professors because they were dedicated to the rigors of their calling.  Just as a Christian monk lived in poverty because the pursuit of truth provided spiritual nourishment and personal fulfillment, a scholar embraced a penurious life within academia in exchange for the privilege of seeking authentic truth.  The reward — unvarnished enlightenment — was understood to be more valuable than money.

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As ICAN Warned, RSV Vaccine for Pregnant Women May Pose Risks

Three years ago, ICAN sent a letter to members of FDA’s vaccine committee warning of the dangers of Pfizer’s RSV pregnancy vaccine, Abrysvo. A recent study supports ICAN’s position that those concerns were warranted.

In May of 2023, ICAN’s legal team sent a letter to the Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee (VRBPAC), the FDA committee that makes recommendations on whether or not a new vaccine should be approved. In the letter, ICAN asked the committee to hold off on recommending the approval of Abrysvo until concerning safety signals from the clinical trials had been further investigated. The committee ignored ICAN’s warnings and, shortly after, FDA approved the vaccine.

ICAN’s letter highlighted the following concerns from the Abrysvo clinical trial: “In mothers, serious adverse events included prolonged labor, premature delivery, postpartum hemorrhage, arrested labor, and gestational hypertension, the most frequent of which were preeclampsia and fetal distress.”

A recent study shows safety signals for pregnancy-associated hypertensive disorders (including gestational hypertension), premature rupture of membranes (PROM), and preterm PROM, after receipt of the Abrysvo vaccine. In fact, even though this study was sponsored by Pfizer, the study authors couldn’t avoid stating that “[f]urther epidemiological studies are needed to refine risk estimates….”

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Nonconsensual Drug Testing Has Criminalized Tens of Thousands of Pregnant People

New York had the chance to make history in more arenas than basketball this June. Earlier this month, the New York Senate passed the Maternal Health, Dignity and Consent Act, becoming the first legislative chamber in the country to pass legislation that would require informed consent for drug testing of pregnant people. But despite that promising step, the state has once again failed to protect some of its most vulnerable residents from unjust criminalization.

There was a broad coalition of support for this legislation, including researchers, health care providers, and advocates. Several prominent medical and legal groups supported the legislation, including the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, the American Academy of Pediatrics, and the New York City Bar Association. However, despite the wave of support for the legislation, the victory in the New York Senate was short-lived. The Maternal Health, Dignity and Consent Act died when it didn’t get a vote in the Assembly.

This isn’t the first time this kind of legislation has failed to pass in New York; advocates have been trying for seven years to ban nonconsensual drug testing of pregnant people and have failed every year. This legislation, which has repeatedly been reintroduced only to fail, would have prohibited health care providers in the state from drug testing pregnant or postpartum people and their newborns without explicit verbal and written informed consent. The legislation would have, however, allowed for health care providers to override the ban if there was a significant and immediate medical emergency.

While drug and alcohol use while pregnant can present complications for a newborn, nonconsensual drug testing of pregnant people doesn’t solve the issue at hand. It erodes trust between the health care provider and the patient, a core tenet in any health care relationship. And it does nothing to treat addiction as the disease that it is. This practice has been shown to force pregnant people to delay prenatal care, afraid of the potential criminal consequences of being drug tested against their will. Moreover, nonconsensual drug testing could trap the birthing parent in a web of criminalization that, at best, hinders family bonding, and at worst, irrevocably tears families apart — all because of a disease.

Mandatory, nonconsensual drug testing has put more than 70,000 pregnant people in 21 states into the criminal legal system over a six-year period, according to a landmark study by the Marshall Project, and that is likely a significant undercount. This violation criminalizes pregnant people who are dealing with addiction. It does nothing to treat their addiction or support them and their newborn as they transition to this next phase of life. Instead, for too many pregnant people, it can tear their family apart at the most fragile time and force Child Protective Services (CPS) involvement, which can make recovery for birthing people even less likely in the wake of trauma.

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mRNA Vaccines Linked to Catastrophic Ovarian Damage

A groundbreaking study reveals that mRNA vaccines trigger irreversible destruction of women’s primordial follicles — the finite ‘egg reserve’ that dictates fertility and menopause timing.

Karaman et al. (2024) found that rats injected with human-equivalent mRNA COVID-19 doses suffered:

  • more than 60% loss of primordial follicles (*p* < 0.001) — the non-renewable foundation of female fertility
  • plummeting Anti-Müllerian Hormone (AMH) — a key marker of ovarian reserve
  • a surge in follicle apoptosis (cell death) via elevated TGF-β1, VEGF, and caspase-3.

If this translates to humans, the implications are dire. Think early menopause, infertility, and a generational fertility crash.

There are human data reflecting this trend: Alvergne et al. (2022) reported disrupted menstrual cycles in 42% of vaccinated women, with some experiencing prolonged irregularities. However, more research is needed.

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Babies exposed to cannabis in the womb show no signs of impaired brain development, study finds

Children exposed to cannabis in the womb do not show signs of impaired cognitive or language development by age three, according to new research that challenges concerns about prenatal cannabis use.

The study, published in the journal Early Human Development, found that children with prenatal cannabis exposure actually scored higher on language assessments than unexposed children, and performed equally well on cognitive tests.

Recent data shows that past-month cannabis use amongst pregnant women in the US has grown from 3.8% in 2002 to 7% in 2017, and daily use during pregnancy increased from 0.9% to 3.5% in the same period.

This prompted the multi-national team of researchers from King’s College London, Cambridge University, Aalborg University, and the University of Oslo to hypothesise that children exposed to cannabis while developing in the womb would develop cognitive and language issues by the age of three.

The study analysed data from Danish families registered with Familieambulatorier (Family outreach clinics), which continuously monitor children of families deemed vulnerable or high-risk from early pregnancy until the child reaches school age.

The cohort consisted of 810 Danish children born between the years of 2009 and 2015 who were not diagnosed with conditions such as foetal alcohol syndrome or epilepsy, as these conditions would negatively affect the outcome of language and cognitive assessments.

Children were split into four groups, based on their exposure during gestation. 106 (13%) were exposed to cannabis only, 138 (17%) were exposed to tobacco only, 112 (14%) were exposed to both, and 454 (56%) were registered as not being exposed to either substance.

Researchers found that children with prenatal cannabis exposure achieved a higher Bayley-III Language scale score of 3.26-points than those in the group who were not exposed to cannabis, and they found that exposure to tobacco did not worsen this outcome.

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Possible Link Between RSV Vaccine During Pregnancy and Health Problems: Study

Pfizer’s vaccine against respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) may be associated with certain health problems in pregnant women, including hypertensive disorders, researchers said in a study published on April 21.

Ashley Michnick, a research scientist at Harvard Medical School, and researchers with Pfizer and other entities analyzed data from five systems, including CVS Health and Kaiser Permanente Northwest.

They analyzed pregnancies that occurred from Sept. 22, 2023, through Aug. 9, 2024, and found that pregnant mothers received Pfizer’s vaccine between 32 and 36 weeks of gestation. The number of included pregnancies was 13,619.

Compared with pregnant women who received a different vaccine, such as an influenza shot, during the same gestational weeks during the study period, the women who received the RSV vaccine were more likely to have pregnancy-associated hypertensive disorders, such as inpatient gestational hypertension.

The risk was also higher when the RSV vaccine recipients were compared with women who had given birth in previous years, or a historical comparator group.

The researchers also recorded an elevated risk for premature rupture of membranes among RSV vaccine recipients.

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Anchor Baby Boom: New Pew Data Shows Nearly 10% of All U.S. Births in 2023 Were to Illegal Alien or Temporary Immigrant Mothers

Nearly 10 percent of all babies born in the United States in 2023 were to mothers who were either illegal aliens or holding temporary legal status, according to new data released by the Pew Research Center.

The figures, published late last month, show that 320,000 of the roughly 3.6 million babies born across the country that year had mothers who were non-citizens.

This marks the highest total of anchor babies since 2010, when Pew recorded 325,000 such births, and represents an increase for the third straight year.

Of the 320,000 births:

Approximately 245,000 were to mothers who were unauthorized immigrants, with fathers who were neither U.S. citizens nor lawful permanent residents.

Another 15,000 involved mothers with temporary legal status and fathers who were not citizens or lawful permanent residents.

The remaining 60,000 were born to illegal immigrant mothers where the father was a U.S. citizen or lawful permanent resident.

Pew reports:

Generally, the trends in births to unauthorized immigrants follow the growth and decline of the unauthorized immigrant population. The number of unauthorized immigrants more than tripled from 1990 to 2007. The number of births also more than tripled, from 120,000 in 1990 to a peak of about 380,000 in 2006.

In 1990, births to unauthorized immigrant mothers were about 3% of the 4.1 million births in the U.S. that year. In 2006, these births were about 9% of the total.

Between 2006 and 2019, the annual number of births to unauthorized immigrant mothers dropped by more than 40%, to 215,000.

Pew estimates that roughly 260,000 of these children would not have qualified for automatic U.S. citizenship under President Donald Trump’s January 2025 executive order limiting birthright citizenship to cases where at least one parent is a citizen or lawful permanent resident.

That order is currently facing a legal challenge at the Supreme Court, which heard oral arguments on April 1.

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USDA Issues Public Health Alert Over Chicken Nuggets Sold in Walmart

The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) issued a public health alert for frozen chicken nuggets sold by Oklahoma-based Dorada Foods as the products could be contaminated with “unsafe levels of lead,” the agency said in an April 1 announcement.

The warning is applicable to ready-to-eat chicken nuggets sold by the company in 29-oz. plastic bags under the name “Great Value Fully Cooked Dino Shaped Chicken Breast Nuggets.” The item, manufactured on Feb. 10, comes with the lot code 0416DPO1215 and has a “Best If Used By” date of Feb. 10, 2027, FSIS said.

The products were shipped and sold at Walmart locations across the United States. Great Value is a primary private-label brand of Walmart.

“Lead is especially dangerous for pregnant women, infants, and young children because it can harm developing brains and nervous systems, sometimes causing lasting problems. There is no safe amount of lead exposure,” FSIS warned.

“Guidelines from the Food and Drug Administration provide an interim reference level (IRL) of 2.2 micrograms. The amount of lead found in these nuggets could be as much as five times higher than this IRL for children. Health experts also say these nuggets may be a risk for women who are pregnant or who could become pregnant.”

In a January 2025 post, the Food and Drug Administration warned that lead toxicity can affect people of any age and health status.

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HUNDREDS of companies provide BIRTH TOURISM for foreign moms who want US citizen babies

During oral arguments before the Supreme Court regarding birthright citizenship, the Trump administration noted the prevalence of “birth tourism,” or the action of an expecting foreign national traveling to the United States with the intention of giving birth to their child on American soil, granting them US citizenship. 

Kayleigh McEnany said on Fox News as the Supreme Court was in session, “There are more than 500 firms in China that facilitate people coming from the Chinese Communist Party to give birth here in the United States. Obama enabled this through loopholes dating back to 2009, and what that could mean is 1 million new voters by 2030. Imagine that, Communist Party voters.”

Over the years, a number of companies across the US and its territories have catered to mothers from countries such as Russia and China. Recent reports have revealed companies operating in the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, a US territory in the Pacific. 

Analysts have estimated that around 1,000 companies offer birth tourism services to US territories and the mainland. They claim that in China alone, 1.5 million American-born babies are being raised by Chinese parents who have participated in such services. 

Among such companies is the Shanghai-based GlobalBaby8, which advertises “economy” packages for expecting mothers starting at $14,000, and a “Supreme Type” package that starts at $45,000 and includes features such as a luxury villa, shopping and leisure trips, dedicated postpartum nanny service, and a one-month birthday party for the child. 

Another company, China Mifubaby Group, has offices in California and multiple Chinese cities, and caters to Korean and Japanese moms-to-be, advertising “expedited visas,” “American citizenship,” and “short direct flight distance.” 

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