University of Michigan professor Arline T. Geronimus has been doing research on race and “biological weathering,” or how stress affects lifelong health risks, for several years. Even controlling for variables like wealth and education, Black women faced the highest levels of “cumulative wear and tear on the body’s systems” due to stress factors they were exposed to in their daily lives. “Accumulated stress across life makes pregnancy riskier for Black women at an earlier age than for white women,” Godbolt says.

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