The Sociology Research Forum hosts Professor Ethan Raker for a presentation titled, “Extreme Heat, Adaptation, and Racial Health Disparities at Birth.”
Abstract: I examine how in utero exposure to extreme heat affects birth outcomes. Existing studies tend to analyze data from a singular study site over a narrow time frame, limiting exploitable variation in temperature and generalizability across contexts. In contrast, I use near-population-level data on live births to U.S.-born White, U.S.-born Black, and Mexican-born Hispanic mothers from 1970-1979 to estimate how effects vary across maternal race and access to key adaptation resources, namely residential air conditioning. Results show that exposure to heat in the last pregnancy month lowers newborn birth weight, on average, but no effect is detected for immigrant Hispanic mothers—the group with the highest exposure due to spatial and temporal nature of risk. Moreover, I demonstrate that in this cohort, negative effects on birth weight were both significant and meaningful in places with low residential AC coverage. These empirical findings have broad implications for sociological concepts of vulnerability and adaptation, and they point to new avenues of research at the intersection of climate change and health disparities.