Being Indian or Pakistani is as great a risk factor for stillbirth as smoking

There is growing evidence to suggest a mother's ethnicity influences how fast her placenta ages as her pregnancy progresses.

Australian women born in South Asia are more likely to have a stillbirth than other women, perhaps due to a rapidly ageing placenta that cannot support the pregnancy, new research suggests.

Our study looked at 700,000 births in Victoria over more than a decade. We found women born in India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Afghanistan and Bangladesh had a 1.5 increased chance of a stillbirth at the end of their pregnancy (known as a “term stillbirth”) compared with women born in Australia or New Zealand.

That’s equivalent to 2.6 term stillbirths per 1,000 births for South Asian-born women compared with