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Some doctors are now advising their pregnant patients to avoid plastic itself, which contains harmful chemicals that can hurt some mothers and babies alike.
Marya Zlatnik, a University of California at San Francisco fetal medicine specialist, told the Washington Post that when giving some of her early-pregnancy patients the rundown of what they should and shouldn’t consume or be exposed to, she’s begun adding plastic products to her no-no list.
Her concern: the chemicals known as phthalates, which make plastics stronger and more flexible but also act as a hormone disruptor that has been linked to everything from attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and asthma to obesity and premature birth, among countless other health issues.
Unlike per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances or PFAS, another widespread and terrifying class of contaminants referred to as “forever chemicals” due to their longevity, some scientists have taken to calling phthalates “everywhere chemicals,” because they dissipate quickly but are nonetheless constantly contaminating basically everyone on the planet thanks to massive plastic overconsumption.
Phthalates are believed to be inside basically every human body on Earth, and it’s not hard to see why: the Food and Drug Administration has approved nine different types of these compounds for food packaging, and they invariably rub off onto what we eat and then are ingested into our bodies.
While these chemicals are, as WaPo notes, detrimental to everyone’s health, gynecologists and obstetricians are becoming increasingly worried about how they specifically affect prenatal health as a growing body of evidence suggests they’re unduly dangerous for pregnant women and babies. Other scientists are also growing concerned about phthalate exposure in utero affecting fertility down the line, especially in men.
“If any of these chemicals get into a woman while she’s pregnant, the chemicals will go right across into the baby,” explained Boston College pediatrician Philip Landrigan in an interview with the newspaper. “The placenta provides no protection at all.”
The results of prenatal phthalate exposure can be immediate and dramatic.
In 2022, the National Institutes of Health found, based on a large systemic review involving more than 6,000 participants over more than three decades, that women with higher levels of phthalate byproducts in their urine were more between 12 to 16 percent likely to deliver their babies preterm, defined as least three weeks before their due dates.
Speaking to WaPo, senior NIH investigator Kelly Ferguson said that even those initial findings, which were published in the journal JAMA Pediatrics and led to subsequent research about related racial disparities in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives, were a pretty big deal.
“Having an increase of 15 percent in preterm birth is huge for the overall population,” Ferguson, who was also a senior author on the 2022 study, told WaPo. “There’s health consequences for children and moms, financial costs.”
More recently, public health researchers from Emory, Columbia, and the University of North Carolina established a link between higher phthalate levels in mothers’ blood and metabolism issues that were detectable at birth in their babies.
As with other massive and avoidable environmental health issues, industry advocates and naysaying researchers aren’t convinced that phthalates are all that bad for us, in or outside the womb.
To explain away the well-documented health defects of these hormone disrupting chemicals, pediatric endocrinologist and testicle obsessive Rod Mitchell of Scotland’s University of Edinburgh — who was quoted by WaPo being very concerned about testosterone development during gestation — said he thinks phthalates might not be to blame for any prenatal problems.
“We’re just constantly exposed to a soup of chemicals,” he told the newspaper.
A paid plastic industry shill, meanwhile, had a more entertaining form of obfuscation.
Speaking on behalf of the Flexible Vinyl Alliance, representative Kevin Ott pointed to the phthalate content of things like blood bags and other medical devices as reaffirming use cases for the chemicals.
“Those benefits should be weighed against the concerns with phthalates,” Ott told WaPo in an email.
More on chemicals: How Did Walmart Frozen Shrimp Become Contaminated With Radioactive Material?