The connection between money and health is rarely as direct as we imagine. We know that poverty grinds people down, but the mechanisms often stay hazy, buried in abstractions about “access” and “resources.” Now a study spanning nearly three decades offers something more concrete: when states raised the minimum wage, fewer pregnant women developed dangerous hypertension.
The finding, published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, emerged from an analysis of all 50 states between 1992 and 2019. Researchers at Rutgers University tracked 61 instances where states increased their minimum wage by at least a dollar and compared what happened to maternal health in those states against places where wages stayed flat. The pattern was clear. For every dollar increase, there were roughly 64 fewer cases of hypertensive disorders of pregnancy per 100,000 women over the following five years.
Hypertensive disorders, which include preeclampsia and eclampsia, are not minor complications. They are a leading cause of maternal death in the United States and raise the risk of stroke, seizures, and lasting heart damage. Their prevalence has doubled over the past two decades. And they do not strike randomly. Women in lower-income communities face significantly higher rates, as do Black women, who experience pregnancy-related hypertension at 1.3 times the rate of white women.
The Benefits Took Years to Appear, Which Tells Us Something Important
The health improvements did not show up immediately after a wage hike. The strongest effects emerged two to four years later, a lag that points toward something deeper than a woman simply being able to afford a doctor’s visit once she is already pregnant. What seems to matter is preconception health, the physical condition a woman is in before pregnancy even begins.
Chronic financial stress wears on the cardiovascular system. Researchers call it allostatic load, the cumulative toll of sustained hardship on the body. It elevates blood pressure, disrupts sleep, and makes it harder to eat well or manage existing health problems. A modest raise might mean fresh vegetables instead of processed food, or the breathing room to keep up with blood pressure medication. It might mean fewer skipped prenatal vitamins, or less anxiety about making rent. Over months and years, these small advantages accumulate. The body keeps score.
“Social determinants of health have an important impact on people’s well-being across their life course, and it’s no different for pregnancy,” said Slawa Rokicki, an assistant professor at the Rutgers School of Public Health.
The researchers controlled for other safety net programs, including the Earned Income Tax Credit and Medicaid expansion. The wage effect held up across multiple statistical approaches, though results for maternal hemorrhage were less certain.
A Policy Gap
Twenty states still set their minimum wage at the federal floor of $7.25 an hour, a rate unchanged since 2009. Adjusted for inflation, it buys less today than it did in the 1960s. Women are more likely than men to earn minimum wage, which places them squarely in the path of any health consequences tied to stagnant pay. And because women of color are disproportionately represented in these jobs, wage policy becomes tangled up with the persistent racial gap in maternal mortality.
“The federal minimum wage hasn’t been raised since 2009; it’s a poverty wage,” Rokicki said. “Increasing the minimum wage is going to have profound impacts on peoples’ lives; the research on that is indisputable. We find it also has important impacts on health during pregnancy.”
The study cannot say precisely which women benefited most, since it relied on state-level data rather than individual health records. Future research using individual records could help clarify whether wage increases narrow the disparities that currently put Black mothers at greatest risk. But the scale of the analysis, covering every state over 28 years, suggests something real is happening. When lawmakers debate the minimum wage, they tend to talk about household budgets and business costs. They might also consider that a woman’s blood pressure during pregnancy can be shaped by decisions made in a statehouse years before she conceives.
American Journal of Preventive Medicine: 10.1016/j.amepre.2025.108156
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