Trump Called Himself the ‘Fertilization President.’ He Just Gutted the CDC’s Infertility Research Agency
Trump and RFK Jr. just eliminated entire agencies working on intimate partner violence prevention, studying racial disparities in maternal mortality, and researching treatments for infertility.
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Last week, Health and Human Services Secretary and alleged sexual assailant Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., pledged to lay off about 10,000 employees from his department, many of whom are actively working to prevent large swaths of the country from getting sick. On Tuesday, Kennedy delivered on that pledge. Over 7,000 workers at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the National Institutes of Health, the Food and Drug Administration, and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services received reduction-in-force (RIF) letters. Many are career civil servants and researchers with decades of experience in their fields. HHS entirely shuttered several key agencies within the CDC, including the intimate partner violence prevention team on the CDC’s Division of Violence Prevention; the team researching infertility and assisted reproductive technology (ART); and the Pregnancy Risk Assessment Monitoring System (PRAMS), which studies race and class disparities in maternal mortality.
“The amount of knowledge that is being purged today at CDC is just tragic,” one of the impacted workers told Rolling Stone.
Ironically, just last week, Trump declared himself the “fertilization president,” which, FWIW, is an extremely creepy nickname for a sexual predator to give himself. On the campaign trail, Trump also called himself the “father of IVF,” performatively pledging his support for the fertility technology as Democrats warned that abortion bans across the country jeopardized access to IVF. In February, Trump signed a wholly symbolic executive order promising to hear policy proposals for how to make IVF more affordable.