In a STAT News opinion piece published November 2, 2026, Dr. Elyce Cardonick — a maternal fetal medicine physician and founder of the Cancer and Pregnancy Registry — writes that pregnant patients diagnosed with cancer are often advised to end a pregnancy or deliver early, without a full discussion of treating cancer during pregnancy. Drawing on nearly three decades of clinical experience and registry research, she notes that chemotherapy can often be given safely in the second and third trimesters, allowing many infants to be delivered at term.
Cardonick explains that pregnant women with cancer have similar survival rates to non-pregnant women with the same cancer, and that no study has shown improved maternal survival from ending a pregnancy compared with continuing it. Longitudinal follow-up of children exposed to chemotherapy in utero found they performed as well on developmental tests as unexposed children at ages ranging from 18 months through the early teens, though those children were about three times more likely to need eyeglasses. Children delivered electively preterm to avoid maternal cancer treatment did less well.
She also describes work with the Society for Maternal Fetal Medicine and the American Society of Clinical Oncology to publish guidelines on imaging, surgery, and chemotherapy timing when cancer and pregnancy occur together.