: Oral health and dental treatment are essential during pregnancy. Poor maternal oralhealth may lead to pain, infection, and unnecessary loss of teeth. 1 It may also resultin early and more extensive caries in the child. 2 A delay in dental care due to pregnancy may worsen dental outcomes and the long-term dental health of the motherand child. 1 Poor management of maternal oral health increases the incidence ofpremature birth, gestational diabetes, and preeclampsia. 3 , 4 , 5 Dental treatmentfor the pregnant person may require the use of radiographs, restorative materials, andlocal anesthetics. Dentists and the oral health care team should be comfortableproviding treatment.Despite dental treatment being safe during pregnancy for mother and baby, 6 , 7 , 8 many dentists are reluctant to treat pregnant people. 9 Although previously published FDA, ADA, consensus statements, and injectable local anesthetic manufacturers’ information, dentists’ reluctance and hesitancy to treat pregnant people during all stages of pregnancy and for all routine comprehensive care such as exams, diagnostic radiographs, scaling and root planning, restorative, endodontic, and oral surgical procedures persist. Hesitancy is noted with prescribing and exposing radiographs, restorative treatment, and use of local anesthetics resulting in deferred care. 9,10 Local anesthetics are most widely used in dental treatment, and many dental procedures necessitate their use when treating pregnant people. To facilitate dentists’ comfort and clinical decisionmaking in the use of local anesthetics in improving the pregnant population's receipt of dental treatment and care outcomes, and to calibrate practices to the current standard of practice aligning with contemporary evidence, this paper will review essential published evidence-based studies, guidelines, resources, and information fromnational organizations responsible for protecting the public's health.

: The purpose of this paper is to review the FDA pregnancy category, commonly used injectable dental local anesthetics, increase awareness of the safe use of local anesthetics in pregnant people, and increase dentists’ comfort with using local anesthetics in the pregnant person. The goal of this paper is not to provide a critical analysis but rather to provide a context for comparison of injectable local anesthetics to other routinely used pharmaceutical agents that may not be FDA Risk Category “B” such as lidocaine but are used routinely in the management of disease or conditions in pregnant people such as albuterol, FDA Risk Category “C” to help dentists better understand that other common agents with FDA Risk Category higher than “B” are also used in the routine management of pregnant people. Having evidence-based resources from dentistry, medicine, and drug agencies in a single paper that provides context, may better facilitate dentists’ understanding, comfort, and up take of the information into practice.