Ilhem Messaoudi, a professor of immunology at the University of Kentucky, said she and many of her colleagues have been taken aback by the extent to which pregnancy has been affected by the pandemic.Instead, she and other pregnancy experts have spent the past few years scrambling to understand spikes in maternal complications — first reported anecdotally then verified in several large studies — including an extremely small but nonetheless alarming group of unusual stillbirths.While the vast majority of people who are infected do not experience complications, the risk of preeclampsia and other severe issues has been documented to be much higher with infection.For the first nine months of their being, humans are cocooned next to an organ in their mother’s uterus known as the placenta that provides oxygen and other nutrients.And they also echoed those in a paper from Ireland that looked at seven cases — six stillbirths and one second-trimester fetal death in pregnant people infected with the coronavirus — resulting from what the authors called"