The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Wednesday made another plea for pregnant women to get vaccinated as the Delta variant continues to mount and as more pregnant women fall seriously ill.

“The CDC recommends that all pregnant people get vaccinated against COVID-19, based on new evidence about the safety and effectiveness of the COVID-19 vaccines,” the agency stated.

The agency added the vaccine is recommended for those above the age of 12, including women who are breastfeeding, women trying to get pregnant, and those who might become pregnant in the future.

In May, Principal Deputy Director Dr. Anne Schuchat had told the Senate that the CDC already had “reassuring data” on vaccines for pregnant women in their third trimester.

Expecting women run a higher risk of severe illness and pregnancy complications such as miscarriages or stillbirths. Only 23% of pregnant women have received at least one dose of the vaccine. The CDC says there is no increased risk of miscarriage for women who received the vaccine.

“It has never been more urgent to increase vaccinations as we face the highly transmittable Delta variant and see severe outcomes of COVID-19 among unvaccinated pregnant people,” said CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky.

National figures demonstrate the surge in cases among pregnant women are lower than it was during the outbreak’s winter peak, but in some states with low vaccination rates the numbers are higher. “This is by far the worst we’ve seen in the pandemic,” said Dr. Jane Martin, an obstetrician from Ochsner Baptist Medical Center in New Orleans.

At the beginning of the pandemic, Martin said Ochsner had few pregnant patients who were sick but the pace has now changed. She now says the hospital has “multiple critically ill pregnant patients admitted every day.”

“It’s kind of a perfect storm situation,” says Dr. Mark Turrentine, an obstetrics professor at Baylor College of Medicine.

“We have a highly infectious variant of COVID-19 virus in a group of individuals that the majority are not immunized. So we are seeing a lot of sick people,” Turrentine said.

Turrentine also details the major risks of pregnant women getting an asymptomatic case of COVID-19. “There is a three-fold case of intensive care admission, a two-and-a-half-fold increase of being put on mechanical ventilation or bypass support, and a little over one-and-a-half-fold increase risk of death.”

According to the CDC, about 105,000 pregnant women have been infected and 18,000 have been hospitalized. A quarter of those hospitalized received intensive care and 124 died.

Coronavirus CDC