Trump Called Himself the ‘Fertilization President.’ He Just Gutted the CDC’s Infertility Research Agency

Now here we are: The shuttering of ART means researchers whose work could have paved the way for more accessible and effective fertility treatments have all been terminated. Per the CDC’s website, researchers had been examining “new approaches for safe and effective diagnosis and treatment of infertility in women and men,” which could potentially reduce the need for ART, as well as “other medical approaches to achieve pregnancy.”

“Following today’s layoffs at the CDC, there will be no experts on infertility who will be able to inform public policy, brief members of Congress, publish articles and reports, and advance public awareness on the causes and treatments for infertility,” Barbara Collura, president of Resolve: The National Infertility Association, said in a statement.

In February, Talking Points Memo first reported that PRAMS’s work had been paused, allegedly because the agency’s research, which involved surveys asking for respondents’ racial identities, violated President Trump’s executive order prohibiting diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives—even as these questions are essential to understand why Black women are three to four times more likely to die from pregnancy-related causes than white women. The outlet reported that over the last several weeks, PRAMS researchers were working to update the protocol to comply, only for every PRAMS employee to receive an RIF notice on Tuesday. 

“I don’t know how else to say it, this data system is needed,” Marian Jarlenski, a professor of health policy at the University of Pittsburgh, previously told STAT News of the administration’s attacks on PRAMS. “It’s not an option. It’s part of having a functional public health system.” In abortion-banned states, there has been a surge in maternal mortality and morbidities, as people experiencing severe pregnancy complications are denied timely access to emergency abortions. Several abortion-banned states have also recently disbanded or impeded the work of their own maternal mortality committees in an effort to obscure the impacts of their state’s abortion bans.

And just last week, Mother Jones reported that HHS shuttered a research project to address the role of domestic violence in rising maternal mortality rates, so Kennedy and Trump’s targeting of the CDC’s intimate partner violence prevention team unfortunately comes as little surprise. Per the CDC’s website, its efforts on this front included community education and developing services to meet the needs of victims and survivors, like domestic violence shelters and housing support.

The administration’s gutting of key HHS agencies this week appears to have been vast and indiscriminate, targeting hundreds of researchers studying an array of diseases including HIV, as well as vaccines and other vital public health areas—all at a time when outbreaks of measles, bird flu, and other diseases are being reported in some parts of the country. Kennedy claimed last week that the gutting of HHS employees is meant to “[reduce] bureaucratic sprawl” and “[realign] the organization [HHS] with its core mission and our new priorities.” But Kennedy is a known anti-vaxxer who pledged to carry out Trump’s rabidly anti-abortion agenda in order to get confirmed by Republicans in the Senate.

These latest attacks on reproductive health are entirely in line with what we’ve seen from this administration so far. Also this week, HHS froze key grants for family planning providers across the country, accusing them of violating the president’s executive orders on DEI and immigration by serving undocumented patients. The administration has also been busy censoring key information about reproductive health from federal websites, defunding global organizations that even offer information about abortion services, and empowering anti-abortion activists to violently protest abortion clinics.