The day I got my first COVID vaccine, I wept with relief. It was the weekend of Mother?s Day, and I couldn?t think of a better gift to give to myself and to my toddler son, who goes to daycare all week.
This shot, this absolute miracle of modern science, was for me a light at the end of a tunnel lined with thousands of deaths, overburdened intensive care units, and the daily anguish of staying apart from loved ones in hopes of keeping them safe.
Then, in the weeks before becoming eligible for my second dose, I got pregnant. 
The day I missed my period, I joined a high risk group?a population considered extra vulnerable to respiratory viruses and serious illness, and COVID-19 specifically. In the third and fourth waves of the pandemic, unvaccinated pregnant people are getting admitted to hospital ICUs at an alarming rate. In fact, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has just issued an urgent warning with updated data: Pregnant people with symptomatic COVID have a 70 percent increased risk of death. There’s also an increased risk of preterm birth, stillbirth or NICU admission for the baby.  Despite these very real, very scary outcomes we now know about, provincial data in Ontario, where I live, shows that as of September 12, only 54 percent of pregnant people were double-vaxxed. (This is compared to over 81 percent of the general adult population.) 
In the U.S., rates are even lower: the CDC says only 31 percent of currently pregnant people are vacc...