In 2011, Sarah McMahon and colleagues published “The Impact of Emotional and Physical Violence During Pregnancy on Maternal and Child Health at One Year Post-partum,” hereafter, “The Impact,” in the journal, Child and Youth Services Review. While existing studies had indicated negative chronic effects resulting from intimate partner violence, or IPV, such as miscarriage and premature labor, there was little research specifically analyzing the separate and joint effects of psychological and physical abuse on pregnant women and fetuses. The authors reported that both physical and emotional IPV had negative impacts on the woman and child at one-year after birth, including worse overall health and increased likelihood of depression. In “The Impact,” the researchers analyzed the effects of partner abuse during pregnancy, distinguishing between the effects of emotional abuse and physical abuse on health outcomes for a pregnant woman and her offspring.
In 2001, Kevin M. Godfrey and David J.P. Barker published the article “Fetal Programming and Adult Health” in Public Health Nutrition, where they identified the significance of maternal nutrition during pregnancy to healthy offspring development. The authors describe the effects of maternal nutrition on fetal programming of cardiovascular disease. Fetal programming is when a specific event during pregnancy has effects on the fetus long after birth. The authors argue that fetuses may adapt to varying shifts in their environment in utero, such as slowed fetal growth in response to malnutrition. While those adaptations can be helpful in utero, the authors assert they may persist into adolescence and adulthood, causing conditions such as high blood pressure or diabetes. Godfrey and Barker assert that fetal adaptations to maternal malnutrition may be implicated in the development of cardiovascular disease in adulthood, and called for future research investigating additional fetal programming variables.