Researcher Studying Domestic Violence & Maternal Mortality Loses Funding Over RFK Jr.’s MAHA Agenda

“There is just this implicit bias that violence against women is not an important public health area or a significant area of study," the researcher told Mother Jones.

By Kylie Cheung | March 25, 2025 | 6:56pm

Photo: Getty Images Abortion Politics

Researcher Studying Domestic Violence & Maternal Mortality Loses Funding Over RFK Jr.’s MAHA Agenda

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., an alleged sexual assailant and our new Health and Human Services secretary, has vowed to “Make America Healthy Again” (MAHA) by giving kids measles, rotting all of our teeth by removing fluoride from water, and defunding key public health research. In a new interview with Mother Jones, Rebecca Fielding-Miller, a public health professor at the University of California, San Diego, says she learned on Friday that she lost her funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) for her research work on the nexus of domestic violence and maternal mortality.

The letter she received stated: “Research programs based primarily on artificial and non-scientific categories, including amorphous equity objectives, are antithetical to the scientific inquiry, do nothing to expand our knowledge of living systems, provide low returns on investment, and ultimately do not enhance health, lengthen life, or reduce illness.” Emily Hilliard, deputy press secretary for the Health and Human Services Department, which oversees NIH, further clarified to Mother Jones: “As we begin to Make America Healthy Again, it’s important to prioritize research that directly affects the health of Americans.”

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The U.S. currently leads wealthy nations in maternal mortality, which has been steadily increasing since the 1990s, and intimate partner homicide is a leading cause of death among pregnant people. Fielding-Miller told the outlet that she received a $400,000 NIH grant in the fall to train a dozen early-career researchers on improved methods of researching and measuring intimate partner violence during pregnancy, since existing research on this subject matter is sparse. Additionally, pregnant people in states that have banned abortion are at greater risk of homicide perpetrated by an intimate partner, and there’s a direct link between laws that shut down abortion clinics and the risk of intimate partner violence-related homicide.

She says she suspects her project was targeted because it was entitled, “Restoring equity to measuring and preventing perinatal intimate partner violence.” She explained, “I’m assuming that whatever knock-off AI they’re using flagged [the word ‘equity’],” and added, “There is just this implicit bias that violence against women is not an important public health area or a significant area of study.”

In February, we also learned the Trump administration had paused a key program studying racial disparities in maternal and infant health outcomes. (Black pregnant people are three to four times more likely than white pregnant people to die from pregnancy or birth-related causes.) Under Trump’s executive order, this research amounts to wasteful “DEI.”

“Pregnancy is a really dangerous time for women in violent relationships, and there’s also just not a lot of good research on violence, in large part because the NIH has not prioritized it,” Fielding-Miller told the outlet. “The goal” of her research project, she said, “was to jumpstart careers in this cohort so that more people would be doing high-quality research on IPV in the perinatal period. It was a pretty big bang for your buck.”

In 2023, the National Domestic Violence Hotline reported that, in the first year since Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health, as abortion bans spread across the country, the number of calls they received about reproductive coercion doubled. In 2024, the Hotline published a survey of domestic violence victims who have experienced reproductive coercion, and 13% of respondents said abusive partners used or threatened violence while they were pregnant. It’s estimated that up to 22% of abortion patients recently experienced IPV, which played a role in why some of them sought abortion care.

“The thing that a lot of people find really shocking is that IPV kills more people during pregnancy and immediately after the baby is born than obstetric complications do,” Fielding-Miller said. “The science is not very good on the exact reasons why that is, and it’s certainly not very good on how to prevent it. But this is usually a time of increasing conflict and increasing attempts for partner control.”

If you or someone you know is experiencing domestic violence and seeking options to safely access abortion care, you can get support from If/When/How’s Repro Legal Helpline here or call 844-868-2812. You can reach the National Domestic Violence Hotline here or call 1-800-799-SAFE.