Pregnancy and COVID-19: Baby Negative for COVID-19

Transcript

And then there’s the situation where the mom is COVID-19 positive, but the baby is found to be potentially COVID-19 negative or undetermined. And in that situation, protecting the baby becomes very, very important. Now that doesn’t mean that a mom can’t decide that she wants to be physically present with her baby and be in physical contact. And if that’s the case, considering things like how important skin to skin contact is, we know that skin to skin contact immediately at delivery can increase the success of breastfeeding. It can help the baby maintain body temperature. It can increase bonding between mom and baby. And we also know that there’s a lot of potential downstream benefits from that skin to skin physical contact with mom at the time of delivery that we’re not even thinking about. We know that there’s potential reduction in diseases or chronic diseases for that baby later in life, if they’ve had skin to skin contact at delivery. So it’s really an emerging science in terms of what is best for baby and mom at the time of delivery. And COVID-19 is putting a little bit of a kink in some of those scientific findings.