{"id":41603,"date":"2025-04-28T19:53:00","date_gmt":"2025-04-29T00:53:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/?p=41603"},"modified":"2025-04-28T22:56:28","modified_gmt":"2025-04-29T03:56:28","slug":"hhs-cuts-risk-undermining-reproductive-health-services","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/?p=41603","title":{"rendered":"HHS cuts risk undermining reproductive health services"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p class=\"has-medium-font-size wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Trump cuts risk undermining reproductive health services<\/strong><strong><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-medium-font-size wp-block-paragraph\">President Trump has called himself the&nbsp;\u201cfertilization president\u201d&nbsp;but his administration\u2019s recent gutting of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have called his commitment to in vitro fertilization (IVF) into question.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-medium-font-size wp-block-paragraph\">\u201cTrump said he is the fertility president. But how does cutting these programs support his administration\u2019s position?\u201d one former CDC employee said. &nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-medium-font-size wp-block-paragraph\">The Department of Government Efficiency\u2019s mass layoffs at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) have reduced staff working at&nbsp;<strong>maternal health and reproductive health programs<\/strong>&nbsp;including teams that report on fertility outcomes of IVF clinics. &nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-medium-font-size wp-block-paragraph\">HHS laid off 10,000 employees earlier this month, which included removing three-quarters of the&nbsp;<strong>CDC\u2019s reproductive health division<\/strong>, a former employee told The Hill. &nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-medium-font-size wp-block-paragraph\">The CDC\u2019s six-person Assited Reproductive Technology Surveillance team is now gone as well as a 17-person team that worked on the Pregnancy Risk Assessment Monitoring System. The CDC no longer has a dedicated team studying&nbsp;<strong>contraception use<\/strong>. &nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-medium-font-size wp-block-paragraph\">Couples who are trying to conceive now do not have access to trustworthy federal information on&nbsp;<strong>IVF clinics<\/strong>&nbsp;and their chances of conceiving. And there are now fewer people monitoring pregnancy health outcomes or doing in-depth research on why some women and children die in childbirth.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-medium-font-size wp-block-paragraph\">Public health experts warn that cuts to these programs will have lasting effects on Americans and create a&nbsp;<strong>blind spot in women\u2019s health<\/strong>,<strong>&nbsp;<\/strong>making it more dangerous to be pregnant in the U.S.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-medium-font-size wp-block-paragraph\">The U.S. has one of the&nbsp;<strong>highest maternal mortality rates<\/strong>&nbsp;out of similarly wealthy nations, with 18.6 deaths per 100,000 live births, according to the CDC\u2019s most recent data. &nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-medium-font-size wp-block-paragraph\">\u201cI think women and children in this country are going to be less healthy, going to die sooner, and I think it\u2019s going to take us longer to fully understand the ramifications of that,\u201d said Sean Tipton, chief advocacy and policy officer at the American Society for Reproductive Medicine, which represents fertility medicine providers. &nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-medium-font-size wp-block-paragraph\"><a href=\"https:\/\/thehill.com\/newsletters\/health-care\/5271944-trump-hhs-cuts-risk-undermining-reproductive-health-services\/\">thehill<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Trump cuts risk undermining reproductive health services President Trump has called himself the&nbsp;\u201cfertilization president\u201d&nbsp;but his administration\u2019s recent gutting of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have called his commitment to in vitro fertilization (IVF) into question. \u201cTrump said he is the fertility president. But how does cutting these programs support his administration\u2019s position?\u201d one [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":41604,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5784],"tags":[3314,1973,4172,9069],"class_list":["post-41603","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-health","tag-budget","tag-cut","tag-hhs","tag-reproductive-health"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41603","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=41603"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41603\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":41605,"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41603\/revisions\/41605"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/41604"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=41603"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=41603"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=41603"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}