Abuse during pregnancy demands complex solutions, including a coordinated response from the criminal justice, social service and health care sectors. Intimate partner violence in general, and abuse during pregnancy specifically, should not be conceptualized as a disease or syndrome or disorder, nor should it be classified within one specific category of health problem, such as injury or reproductive, mental or physical health. Rather, abuse is a risk factor for all of these kinds of health problems. However, it is clear that the abuse puts them at greatly increased risk for a multitude of physical and mental health problems.
Abuse happens all too often during pregnancy.
Having established the association between intimate partner violence and LBW, it is important to understand variations in different groups and potential causal pathways. Most of the studies included in the analysis by Murphy and colleagues involved women of lower social classes. This may be because abuse is but one of a cluster of difficult life circumstances affecting birth weight that are associated with a life of poverty. LBW may be the outcome of premature delivery caused by trauma in relatively rare situations or may occur in term infants as a result of more complex causal pathways. In a study of over 1000 women, it was found that both physical and nonphysical intimate partner violence were associated with LBW among women giving birth to term infants, but not for preterm infants.