Leslie Candy was expecting her first baby when she developed pre-eclampsia, dangerously high blood pressure that can cause seizures or strokes if not controlled. So her docs ordered bed rest and gave Candy, 38, intravenous meds to lower her blood pressure. But there are no effective drugs for pre-eclampsia and her condition worsened after she was hospitalized, USA Today writes.

After two days, her docs said the only way to treat the condition was to perform an emergency C-section and delivered her son seven weeks before his due date. He spent more than two weeks in neonatal intensive care.

Although 4 million American women give birth each year, almost no one is developing meds for pregnancy complications, including conditions that threaten the lives of mothers and children, Nicholas Fisk, an obstetrician-gynecologist and director of the University of Queensland Centre for Clinical Research in Australia, tells the paper. He adds there are so few effective drugs for pregnancy-related conditions that, in many cases, docs can save their patients only by delivering babies early.

Researchers also rarely test drugs for common conditions such as depression on pregnant women, says Fisk, whose review of drugs under development was published in January in PloS, the paper writes. And no new classes of drugs have been approved for conditions of pregnancy such as pre-term labor or a liver condition called cholestasis in the past two decades, he tells USA Today.

The absence leaves obstetricians to use decades-old meds, making obstetrics “a specialty stuck in a time warp,” he tells the paper, adding that mMost of the meds taken during pregnancy are prescribed “off label” for unapproved use.

Alan Goldhammer, deputy vp of regulatory affairs for PhRMA, says drugmakers want to help pregnant women, but must consider the risks of exposing a developing fetus to experimental chemicals. Given those concerns, experts says the “drug drought” isn’t likely to end any time soon, the paper writes.

Worldwide, scientists are actively developing only 17 meds for maternal health, Fisk tells the paper. This is less than 3 percent of the 660 drugs being developed for heart disease and half as many being researched for Lou Gehrig’s disease, which affects only 5,600 new patients a year, the paper writes.

No new drugs made primarily for pregnant women are in clinical trials, which is the final phase of testing, Fisk tells USA Today. On average, only about one drug in 10 makes it from early tests to final approval a process that takes about a decade. “We’re not going to have a new drug in the next 10 years,” he tells the paper.

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