Pregnancy during the pandemic: The impact of COVID-19-related stress on risk for prenatal depression
Pregnant women may be particularly sensitive to negative events (i.e., adversity) related to the COVID-19 pandemic and affective responses to these events (i.e., stress). We examined COVID-19-related stress and adversity in a sample of 725 pregnant women residing in the San Francisco Bay Area in March-May 2020, 343 of whom provided addresses in California that were geocoded and matched by census tract to measures of community-level risk factors. Women who were pregnant during the pandemic had substantially elevated depressive symptoms compared to matched women who were pregnant prior to the pandemic. Several individual- and community-level risk and protective factors were associated with women’s scores on two latent factors of COVID-19-related stress and adversity. Highlighting the role of subjective responses to the pandemic in vulnerability to prenatal depression and factors that influence susceptibility to COVID-19-related stress, these findings inform understanding of the psychosocial sequelae of disease outbreaks among pregnant women.