Can glyphosate exposure during pregnancy affect your baby's birth weight?

What's actually in it

Glyphosate is the active ingredient in Roundup and the most widely used herbicide in the world. It's sprayed on conventional corn, soybeans, wheat, and oats. Traces remain on the food after harvest and show up in bread, cereal, crackers, and other grain-based products. You eat it in small amounts every day.

During pregnancy, glyphosate crosses the placenta. Researchers have detected it in the urine of pregnant women and in umbilical cord blood, meaning the baby is exposed too.

What the research says

A 2026 study in Int J Hyg Environ Health measured glyphosate and its breakdown product AMPA in the urine of pregnant women living in the Midwestern U.S., where herbicide use is heaviest. The researchers then tracked the women's pregnancies and recorded their babies' size at birth.

Women with higher glyphosate levels had babies with different birth measurements compared to women with lower levels. The association was strong enough to stand out even after the researchers accounted for other factors like diet, age, and smoking.

AMPA, the chemical glyphosate breaks down into, also showed links to birth outcomes. This matters because AMPA sticks around in the body and in food longer than glyphosate itself.

The study focused on normal dietary and environmental exposure, not farmworkers or people who spray the chemical directly. These were everyday women eating everyday food. The findings add to a growing pile of evidence that routine glyphosate exposure during pregnancy isn't as harmless as regulators have assumed.