One in every 33 babies in the United States is born with a birth defect.

The Birth Defects Study To Evaluate Pregnancy exposureS (BD-STEPS) is a nationwide effort to find causes of birth defects by collecting information from women who have recently been pregnant. As the second collaborative study between the Centers for Birth Defects Research and Prevention (CBDRP), BD-STEPS will further examine promising findings from the National Birth Defects Prevention Study (NBDPS), one of the largest studies on understanding the causes of and risk factors for birth defects in the United States.