Pregnant women with COVID-19 face increased chances for stillbirths compared with uninfected women, and that risk spiked to four times higher for those infected at or around the time of delivery after the delta variant emerged, new government data show.Dr. Joseph Biggio, head of maternal-fetal medicine at Ochsner Health in New Orleans, said the study adds more evidence pregnant women who catch the virus are more likely to have severe outcomes."The best thing that pregnant women can do to protect themselves and their babies from stillbirth is to get vaccinated," Biggio said. Biggio said the study doesn't address the outcomes of pregnant women who have recovered from COVID-19.For pregnant women who are vaccinated against COVID-19, he said, "Their risk of stillbirth, we would expect based on the findings in this study, to be much lower." The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released a report Friday that examined 1.2 million deliveries in 736 hospitals nationwide from March 2020 through September 2021.Stillbirths were rare overall, totaling 8,154 among all deliveries. But the researchers found that for women with COVID-19, about 1 in 80 deliveries resulted in stillbirth. Among the uninfected, it was 1 in 155.Biggio added that pregnant women who already got their shots should consider a booster, particularly in the second half of their pregnancy, so antibodies last through delivery and are passed to the fetus. The new research shows among those with COVID-19, stillbirths were more common in people with chronic high blood pressure and other complications, including those in intensive care or on breathing machines.Biggio, who specializes in high-risk pregnancies, said the study doesn’t prove that COVID-19 caused stillbirths. He said it’s possible some women were so critically ill that physicians trying to keep them alive “couldn’t intervene on behalf of a fetus that they knew was in trouble.”The researchers relied on medical records, and they noted that they were unable to determine if the COVID-19 diagnoses listed at the time of delivery represented current or past infections.Generally, stillbirths are more common among Black people, those who become pregnant over age 35 or those who smoke tobacco during pregnancy.The study didn’t include pregnancy outcomes by race, an area the authors said they plan to investigate in future research “because COVID-19 has disproportionately affected many racial and ethnic minority groups, putting them more at risk of getting sick and dying.”Biggio also said data Ochsner collected on its patients show pregnant women who were unvaccinated had a greater risk of complications.