Do you want to avoid the hassle of traveling with your printed poster? IAPHS2026 is pleased to make poster printing available to you through our supplier PosterSessionOnline. Your poster will be professionally reviewed, printed and shipped directly to Portland and you will be able to pick it up from the Poster desk. Click here to learn more.
Primary Submission Category: Environmental factors
Heat Exposure and Risk of Violence During Pregnancy
Authors: Jorden Jackson, Ursula Gazeley,
Presenting Author: Jorden Jackson*
Emerging evidence links extreme heat exposure to increased interpersonal violence, yet little is known about how climate-related stressors affect violence during pregnancy—a period with profound consequences for maternal and child health. This study examines whether exposure to high ambient temperatures increases the risk of experiencing physical violence during pregnancy across low- and middle-income countries. We leverage all Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) Phase 8 that include the domestic violence module, pregnancy index, and geocoded cluster coordinates, resulting in a final sample from 28 countries. Our outcome is women’s self-reported experience of physical abuse during pregnancy. To address a key limitation of the DHS measure—namely, that it does not identify which pregnancy the violence occurred in—we restrict the analytic sample to women with exactly one lifetime pregnancy. This restriction allows us to align reported violence with a single identifiable pregnancy episode. We merge DHS cluster-level geocodes with high-resolution gridded temperature data from CRU TS to construct measures of heat exposure relative to historical local temperatures during the estimated pregnancy window. We estimate logistic regression models with first-subnational spatial unit and conception year fixed effects, controlling for education, marital status, urban residence, age, and relationship to household head. We hypothesize that higher exposure to extreme heat during pregnancy increases the probability of experiencing physical violence, potentially through economic stress, reduced labor productivity, and heat-induced aggression. We further examine heterogeneity by socioeconomic disadvantage, anticipating disproportionate effects among more vulnerable women. As temperatures rise globally, climate-driven increases in violence during pregnancy may compound risks for both maternal and infant health.