As of December 2024, medical marijuana use is legal in 39 states and Washington D.C., with 24 states and the nation’s capital allowing recreational cannabis use. According to a new study led by scholars at Columbia University, the increasingly widespread legalization of marijuana throughout the country has coincided with a significant rise in the number of women who use cannabis during pregnancy.
The authors examined previous research that found the rate of past-month self-reported cannabis use among pregnant women more than tripled from 1.5 percent in 2002 to 5.4 percent in 2020. In their new study, the research team analyzed rates of cannabis use disorder between 2015 and 2020 regarding 893,430 pregnant women and 1,058,448 total pregnancies included in the Merative Marketscan Commercial Claims and Encounters Database. The yearly prevalence of cannabis use disorder ranged from 0.22 percent in 2015 to 0.27 percent in 2018 and 2019, with a cumulative prevalence of 0.26 percent.
Although it is possible pregnant women may turn to cannabis as a self-medicated anti-nausea therapy, the authors stress that using marijuana during pregnancy could result in adverse long-term maternal and neonatal outcomes. They believe future research is needed to educate the public on abstaining from cannabis during pregnancy and to provide clinicians with the support needed to conduct cannabis use disorder diagnoses and interventions.
The authors included scholars from the Columbia University Irving Medical Center, the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health, and the University of California, San Francisco.