What are birth defects?

What are birth defects?

A birth defect is something abnormal about your newborn baby’s body. Every four and a half minutes, a baby in the United States is born with a birth defect. A defect, which can affect almost any part of your baby’s body, can be:

• Visibly obvious, like a missing arm or a birthmark.
• Internal (inside the body), like a kidney that hasn’t formed right or a ventricular septal defect (a hole between the lower chambers of your baby’s heart).
• A chemical imbalance, like phenylketonuria (a defect in a chemical reaction that results in developmental delay).

Your baby can be born with one birth defect such as a cleft lip (a gap in their upper lip) or multiple birth defects such as a cleft lip and cleft palate (a hole in the roof of their mouth) together, or even a cleft lip and cleft palate with defects of the brain, heart and kidneys.

Your healthcare provider won’t be able to detect all birth defects right when your baby is born. Some defects, such as scoliosis, might not be apparent until your child is several months old. An abnormal kidney might take years to be discovered.