Pot use and pregnancy hardly go hand-in-hand for health reasons, but more American women are using marijuana just before and right after they become pregnant, new research warns.
“These findings should alert women’s health clinicians to be aware of potential increases in daily and weekly cannabis use among their patients,” said lead study author Kelly Young-Wolff. She is a research scientist at Kaiser Permanente, in Oakland, Calif.
In the study, the investigators analyzed data on self-reported marijuana use among nearly 277,000 pregnant women (about 367,000 total pregnancies) in Northern California over nine years, from 2009 to 2017. California legalized recreational marijuana in 2018.
During that time period, the use of marijuana in the year before pregnancy rose from close to 7% to 12.5%, and the use of
