High-Risk Pregnancy: What It Means and How We Can Help

You’re thrilled to be building your family, but this joy has been overshadowed by the news that your pregnancy has been categorized as high risk. You’re, very understandably, concerned.

Our experienced team hears you loud and clear, so we’re focusing on high-risk pregnancy in this month’s blog post. Here’s what the obstetric specialists at Bayard Street Obstetrics & Gynecology — with locations in lower Manhattan, Chinatown, Brooklyn, Flushing, and Syosset, New York — want you to know.

What does a high-risk pregnancy mean?

Let’s start by outlining a few of the conditions that qualify a pregnancy as high risk, a condition that affects between 6% and 8% of pregnancies in the United States. In short, if the fetus, the mother, or both are at greater risk for issues during pregnancy or childbirth, you’re facing a high-risk pregnancy.

When it comes to meeting those criteria, the most common reasons are:

• Maternal age — being over 35 or under 17 qualifies as higher risk
• Having multiples, such as twins or triplets
• A known or suspected defect with the fetus
• Pre-existing health conditions in mothers, such as diabetes, obesity, heart disease, high blood pressure, and liver disease
• A history of miscarriage or delivery issues, such as Cesarean section

You can also start out a pregnancy with normal risk, but if you develop a health issue along the way, we may move you into the high-risk category. 

One example of this is gestational diabetes, which affected slightly more than 8% of American women in 2021, and this number continues to rise. Hypertensive disorders like preeclampsia, which affect between 5% and 10% of pregnancies worldwide, can also recategorize your pregnancy as high risk.

How we treat a high-risk pregnancy

In broad terms, any pregnancy that’s high risk means that we track you more closely during prenatal care. This typically entails:

• More prenatal visits
• Additional fetal monitoring
• More extensive lab testing
• Creating appropriate birth plans

In many cases, we do this out of an abundance of caution, especially if you’re high risk because of something that isn’t necessarily an immediate threat, such as maternal age or having multiples. With these pregnancies, think of it as a little extra oversight on our part.

If there is an active threat, such as preeclampsia or another issue that can threaten your health or the health of the baby, we get more proactive with our care and often work with maternal-fetal medicine specialists or other providers to make sure that you're getting the right care for your needs.

Bear in mind that many women with high-risk pregnancies build healthy families, and our goal is to help you join their ranks.

If you want a clearer idea about what the road ahead might look like for your high-risk pregnancy, we invite you to sit down with one of our pregnancy specialists to discuss your journey ahead. 

Contact Bayard Street Obstetrics & Gynecology in lower Manhattan, Chinatown, Brooklyn, Flushing, or Syosset today. You can call our appointment line at 212-226-5530 or use our convenient online booking.