One hot day last summer, Clarisa Lugo was counting corn and soybean plants in the middle of a 300-acre farm field in Illinois when she started throwing up and panting. Her heart then raced, she stopped sweating, and she had a pounding headache that couldn’t go away for hours. The head index and a blend of temperature and humidity had hit 105°F, and Lugo, who was eight months pregnant, was suffering from heat illness. “I remember that that day it was hard for me to go back normal,” she stated.
Agricultural workers are already among the most vulnerable due to extreme heat, and pregnant workers are coming under great risk as temperatures rise because of climate change. Many women in the U.S are low-income Latino immigrants who toil under the sun ot in humid nurseries year-round. Heat exposure has been linked to many other risks for pregnant people. Pregnancy increases the risks of extreme heat because the body has to work harder to cool down. Heat exposure has been linked to increased risks of miscarriages, stillbirths, preterm births, and birth defects. Combining pregnancy and heat with physical labor can more quickly overwhelm the body’s cooling system, increasing the likelihood of dehydration, heat illness, and strokes.
At heat index rises, pregnant farmworkers face dangers | AP News
