A new US study finds a sharp rise in weight-loss drug prescriptions among new mothers. Here is what is driving the trend and what remains unknown.
For years, the months after childbirth have largely been discussed in terms of recovery, breastfeeding, sleep deprivation and caring for a newborn. But another issue is increasingly entering postpartum healthcare in the United States: weight and metabolic health.
A new study published in JAMA has found a sharp increase in the number of women starting a class of medicines commonly associated with diabetes treatment and weight loss within six months of giving birth.
Among commercially insured US women, the share starting these medicines rose from 0.08% in the first half of 2018 to 1.9% by the first quarter of 2025 — roughly a 24-fold increase.
The medicines are known as GLP-1 receptor agonists, a group that includes drugs such as semaglutide and other widely used treatments. They can be prescribed for type 2 diabetes and, depending on the specific medicine and indication, for obesity or weight management.
The numbers raise a bigger question than simply whether more women are taking weight-loss drugs.
Why is the period after childbirth becoming an increasingly important time for starting them?
The answer appears to involve a combination of diabetes risk, pregnancy-related weight changes, obesity and the growing use of these medicines more broadly.
But researchers also point to something that is still not well understood: what happens when these medicines are used during the postpartum period, particularly among women who are breastfeeding.
The rise is not as simple as “new mothers want to lose baby weight”
The study, led by Sih-Ting Cai, PhD, of the Schaeffer Center for Health Policy & Economics at the University of Southern California, examined private insurance claims covering just over 1 million births over seven years.
Researchers looked at women who started a GLP-1 medicine within six months after giving birth.
The increase was substantial.
In the first half of 2018, only 0.08% of women in the study had a new GLP-1 prescription during that six-month postpartum period. By the first quarter of 2025, the figure had reached 1.9%.
That does not mean that 1.9% of all US new mothers were taking these drugs. The study covered women with commercial insurance, and the researchers were measuring prescription initiation recorded in insurance claims.
Still, the change within the population studied was striking.
And the women starting these medicines were not all in the same situation.
The strongest increase was initially seen among women with type 2 diabetes.
Among women in this group, the share starting a GLP-1 medicine increased from 2.3% to 16.9% over the study period.
In other words, by early 2025, about one in six commercially insured women with type 2 diabetes in the study started one of these medicines within six months of childbirth.
That makes the story partly about weight loss — but also about managing metabolic health after pregnancy.
Pregnancy can change a woman’s metabolic health
Pregnancy places major demands on the body.
Insulin resistance increases during pregnancy, and some women develop gestational diabetes, a form of diabetes first diagnosed during pregnancy.
Gestational diabetes usually resolves after delivery, but it is also a marker of future metabolic risk.
According to the JAMA study, gestational diabetes affects approximately 5% to 9% of pregnancies in the United States. About 20% of women who have it are estimated to develop type 2 diabetes within 10 years.
That means childbirth can become an important point for identifying women who may need longer-term monitoring or treatment.
The new study found that GLP-1 prescribing also increased among women who had experienced gestational diabetes.
Among this group, the share starting a GLP-1 medicine rose from 0.4% in mid-2021 to 2.7% in the first quarter of 2025.
For some women, therefore, a prescription after childbirth may be connected to a continuing diabetes or metabolic-health concern rather than simply a desire to lose pregnancy weight.
What are these drugs actually doing?
GLP-1 stands for glucagon-like peptide-1, a hormone involved in regulating blood sugar and appetite.
Medicines that act on this pathway can help lower blood glucose and can also reduce appetite and food intake. Some have become widely known as weight-loss medications because of the amount of weight loss seen in clinical studies and their growing use for obesity treatment.
This is why drugs such as semaglutide and related medicines have moved from being discussed primarily in diabetes care to becoming part of the wider conversation about obesity and weight management.
Their popularity has grown rapidly in recent years.
That wider change in prescribing is also visible among women after pregnancy.
A separate JAMA study published in 2025 found increasing postpartum use of GLP-1 medicines in Denmark, with many users having overweight or obesity and only a minority having a documented diabetes diagnosis. The researchers noted that postpartum use for weight reduction was increasing while safety information during breastfeeding remained limited.
The new US study adds another piece to that picture.
Women with obesity or overweight saw one of the fastest increases
The US researchers also examined women who had been diagnosed with overweight or obesity before pregnancy.
Among women in this category, GLP-1 initiation increased from 0.4% in the second half of 2021 to 3.9% in the first quarter of 2025.
That was the fastest increase in relative terms among the clinical groups examined by the researchers.
And by the latter part of the study period, women with a documented diagnosis of overweight or obesity represented a large share of postpartum GLP-1 users.
Since the second half of 2024, this group accounted for about 40% of new postpartum prescriptions.
Another 21% of women had no qualifying diagnosis documented before childbirth. However, most of those women subsequently received an obesity or overweight diagnosis before starting the medication.
That detail is important because insurance claims do not necessarily tell us the entire clinical story of an individual patient.
A diagnosis appearing in the records before a prescription does not, by itself, tell us why the doctor prescribed the medication or what the patient’s broader health circumstances were.
The postpartum period is a complicated time for weight
The focus on weight after childbirth can be particularly complicated because pregnancy itself changes a woman’s body.
Pregnancy involves weight gain, hormonal changes and changes in insulin sensitivity. Not every woman returns to her pre-pregnancy weight after delivery.
The JAMA researchers note that fewer than half of women return to their pre-pregnancy weight within one year after giving birth.
But postpartum health is about much more than returning to a previous number on the weighing scale.
A woman may be recovering from childbirth, adjusting to breastfeeding or formula feeding, sleeping irregularly, caring for a newborn and managing an existing health condition — all at the same time.
That makes the decision to begin a medication more complicated than simply asking whether someone wants to lose weight.
It also explains why researchers are increasingly interested in what happens during this period.
There is one major unanswered question: breastfeeding
This is where the new research becomes particularly important.
GLP-1 medicines are generally avoided during pregnancy. The postpartum period is different because the baby is no longer developing inside the mother’s body.
But if a woman is breastfeeding, medication exposure can still become an important consideration.
The researchers say evidence about GLP-1 exposure during breastfeeding remains limited.
That does not mean the study found that these medicines are unsafe during breastfeeding.
It means the available evidence is not sufficient to answer all the questions clinicians and mothers may have.
And the researchers could not determine breastfeeding status from the insurance claims data they analysed.
This is one of the reasons the authors say the rapid increase in postpartum prescribing warrants further study.
For a new mother considering any prescription medication, the relevant question is therefore not simply, “Does this drug cause weight loss?”
It is also:
Why is it being prescribed? When is it being started? Is the woman breastfeeding? What other health conditions does she have? And what evidence exists for that particular situation?
Those questions cannot be answered by prescription numbers alone.
Most women did not start immediately after delivery
Another interesting finding challenges the idea that women are being placed on these drugs immediately after childbirth.
The researchers found that most postpartum women who began a GLP-1 medicine did so at least three months after giving birth.
That suggests prescribing is not necessarily concentrated in the first few weeks of physical recovery.
Instead, for many women, the decision appears to come later in the postpartum period — a point at which ongoing weight, diabetes or other metabolic concerns may have become clearer.
The study, however, cannot establish the reasons behind an individual prescription. Insurance claims can show that a prescription was filled, but they cannot fully explain the clinical conversation that led to it.
A changing picture of who uses these medicines
The numbers also show how quickly the profile of postpartum GLP-1 users may be changing.
At the beginning of the study period, diabetes was a more central part of the picture.
As GLP-1 medicines became increasingly used for obesity and weight management, the postpartum population receiving them also expanded.
By the second half of 2024, women with diagnosed overweight or obesity accounted for about 40% of new postpartum prescriptions, while women with type 2 diabetes accounted for a smaller share.
Women with gestational diabetes also represented a significant portion of prescriptions during that period.
This shift reflects a much broader transformation in the way these medicines are used.
What began primarily as a diabetes-treatment story has increasingly become an obesity and weight-management story as well.
But the study has important limitations
The findings should not be interpreted as a complete picture of postpartum GLP-1 use across the United States.
The researchers analysed commercial insurance claims. Women covered by Medicaid were not included.
That matters because Medicaid covers a substantial share of births in the US, meaning the women represented in this dataset are not necessarily representative of every new mother in the country.
The researchers also relied on claims data rather than detailed clinical records.
That means the study cannot tell us exactly why each woman received a prescription, whether she actually took the medicine as prescribed, or what her individual clinical circumstances were.
And, crucially, the researchers could not determine whether women were breastfeeding.
These limitations do not erase the increase observed in the study. But they do determine what conclusions can reasonably be drawn from it.
The study shows a sharp increase in prescriptions among commercially insured women.
It does not establish that the drugs are responsible for better postpartum health outcomes, nor does it establish that they are appropriate for every woman who has difficulty losing pregnancy weight.
Why this matters beyond weight loss
The growing use of these medicines after childbirth points to a larger issue in women’s health: what happens to women’s health after the pregnancy itself is over?
Pregnancy can reveal conditions that may persist long after delivery. Gestational diabetes can signal future diabetes risk. Excess weight can be associated with longer-term metabolic problems. For women who already have type 2 diabetes, managing the condition does not stop after childbirth.
The postpartum period can therefore be an important opportunity for follow-up care.
But the growing popularity of weight-loss medicines also creates a risk of reducing a complex period of women’s health to body weight alone.
A new mother may need diabetes monitoring, nutritional support, mental-health support, contraception, breastfeeding support, blood-pressure monitoring or treatment for other pregnancy-related conditions.
Weight is only one part of that picture.
The rapid rise in GLP-1 prescriptions makes the question of how postpartum care should evolve increasingly relevant.
A new chapter in the weight-loss drug story
GLP-1 medicines have already changed the public conversation around obesity and weight management.
The latest US data suggest that this change is now reaching another major stage of women’s lives: the months after childbirth.
The increase is substantial — from 0.08% of commercially insured women starting a GLP-1 medicine within six months of delivery in early 2018 to 1.9% by early 2025.
For women with type 2 diabetes, the increase was even more pronounced, reaching about one in six by the end of the study period.
At the same time, women with overweight or obesity and those who experienced gestational diabetes are increasingly represented among new postpartum users.
The numbers show that something is changing.
They do not, however, tell us that every new mother should lose weight, take medication or return to her pre-pregnancy body as quickly as possible.
What they show is that doctors and patients are increasingly considering these medicines during a period when women’s metabolic health can be changing — while important questions, particularly around breastfeeding and longer-term postpartum use, remain unanswered.
That is perhaps the most important part of the story.
The rise in prescriptions is already visible.
The evidence needed to understand exactly how these drugs should be used after childbirth is still catching up.
