Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed is facing criticism over a 2011 Columbia University research paper that opponents say reached a racist, eugenics-like conclusion: that Arab women faced better birth outcomes when they had children with Arab men rather than men from other ethnic backgrounds.
El-Sayed, who has repeatedly described himself as a physician despite not completing a medical residency, warned in the paper, published in the Journal of Immigrant and Minority Health, about the potential risks of “interethnic mating.” He argued that such relationships were associated with a higher likelihood of premature birth.
“Our findings suggest that interethnic mating may be associated with increased risk for adverse birth
outcomes among Arab ethnicity mothers,” he wrote. At the time, he published under the name Abdulrahman M. El-Sayed.
The study, titled “Interethnic mating and risk for preterm birth among Arab
American mothers,” opened by asserting that Arab mothers—whom El-Sayed described as a “growing ethnic group”—had “systematically better birth outcomes” than white mothers.
Citing research he conducted in 2008, El-Sayed wrote that Arab women in the United States were 16% less likely than white women to give birth prematurely. Critics note that the earlier study also found the difference disappeared after accounting for maternal and socioeconomic factors.
Partly supported by grants from the National Institutes of Health, the paper reported that Arab women who had children with white men had 18% higher odds of delivering before 37 weeks and 24% higher odds of a late-preterm birth, defined as between 34 and 36 weeks, compared with Arab women whose children had Arab fathers.
The research found no statistically significant difference in very preterm births—those occurring before 32 weeks—based on whether the father was Arab or white. That finding received comparatively little attention in the paper.
The study has since drawn accusations of pseudoscience from critics.
“This is ‘science’ with ‘a pre-ordained racist & eugenics outcome,’” Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, wrote on X. “Scary stuff.”
Other critics questioned why El-Sayed chose to examine the subject and what they viewed as the study’s underlying premise.
“Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed’s scientific research is…odd. Arab mothers who engage in ‘interethnic mating’ have worse birth outcomes than those who mate with Arab men?” wrote John David Haltigan, an honorary research fellow at the University of Buckingham. “Why research this?”
Under interpretations of Sharia law, Muslim men may marry “chaste” Christian or Jewish women, while Muslim women are permitted to marry only Muslim men.
“The father’s ethnicity did not appear to affect pregnancy outcomes when the mother was a non-Arab white woman,” El-Sayed wrote in the study.
CHECK THIS OUT: Most Iranian Attacks on Strait of Hormuz Fail, CENTCOM Says
The paper also linked interethnic relationships to several social and behavioral differences. It stated that Arab mothers in such relationships were less likely to be married, were older on average and “were more likely to smoke than their counterparts who mated with Arab fathers.”
El-Sayed further cited research suggesting that people in interracial or interethnic relationships experience more stress, which “in turn” could raise the risk of adverse birth outcomes.
For the analysis, researchers examined records involving 617,451 women in Michigan, which El-Sayed identified as the state with the largest Arab-American population in the United States.
The data came from birth records maintained by the Michigan Department of Community Health. The sample included 21,621 Arab women and 594,431 white women who gave birth between 2000 and 2005. Ethnicity was determined through self-reported ancestry.
El-Sayed, 41, argued in the paper against “racial heterogeneity.” He is the son of Egyptian parents.
He is also married to a non-Arab woman. El-Sayed and Sarah Jukaku, who is Indian, married in 2006 and welcomed their first child in 2018. The couple has two daughters.
“So he, an Arab man, can mate interracially, no problem, but Arab women, in his scientific opinion, it seems, are better off staying within their own tribes,” writer Katya Sedgwick wrote on X.
“El Sayed exhibits great many third world attitudes that are repressive, violent, and incompatible with our way of life.”
At the time of his marriage, El-Sayed boasted that the couple was required under Islamic law to live separately for a year without consummating their union.
“The interesting thing about the Muslim perspective is that it’s a lot more serious,” he told The Michigan Daily in 2006.
El-Sayed, who is campaigning to become the first Muslim senator in US history, suggested at the end of the paper future researchers may want to “consider the effects of interethnic mating on risk for
other adverse birth outcomes,” including neonatal mortality and birth defects.
Other research he conducted at Columbia followed the same theme, including one where he looked at “ethnic inequalities in mortality.”
He withdrew his medical school residency application before he would’ve started it, to pursue public health instead.
FIND OUT MORE: The Decline of Once Popular Hollywood Star Olivier Martinez