Adverse pregnancy outcomes: biological essentialism versus embodied biology

We welcome Jennifer Jardine and colleagues’ Article1 documenting the ethnic inequities in adverse pregnancy outcomes, and their recommendations for systemic changes to address these inequities. However, we strongly caution against theorising that innate physiological differences between patients of different race or ethnicities in the study might be causing these inequities. To support this theory, Jardine and colleagues reference a study by Francis and colleagues2 demonstrating strong correlations between the small for gestational age and large for gestational age rates calculated using a global fetal growth standard and customised ethnic group-based birthweight predictions across cohorts from ten countries.