The Trump Admin’s MomsDotGov Website Is ‘Gaslighting 101’

Last week, one of the great Beelzebubs of the Trump administration bore onto the world a new abomination, spawned to continue propagating the lies and BS of its very creator. And no, we’re not talking about the one that regularly dresses like a Temu couch. 

Ahem. The progenitor of said abomination is actually the Department of Health and Human Services, which on Mother’s Day launched a MomsDotGov website to provide “resources, information, and help for new and expecting mothers.” Translation? To peddle dangerous anti-abortion rhetoric, try and get more Americans to procreate, and push abortion seekers towards crisis pregnancy centers (CPCs), or “fake clinics” that take advantage of pregnant people. 

“It’s all of a piece of disguising what’s really at stake in communicating to women about pregnancy,” Emily Martin, chief program officer at the National Women’s Law Center, told Jezebel. “MomsDotGov, I think, is the most recent example of the ways in which the administration is interested in talking about pregnancy and is not interested in talking about pregnancy.”

Indeed, on one hand, MAGA has been using every creepy trick in the book to push its pronatalist agenda, either by vanishing essential birth control services, using the war in Iran to tell people to have more babies, or by having its moms tout the importance of procreating and serving one’s family. All the while, the administration’s also systemically endangered the lives of pregnant people. 

MomsDotGov is no different. While this page purports itself as a one-stop shop for pregnant women, it says nothing about abortion or vaccines—and, at every opportunity, pushes Trump-branded fodder like Trump accounts and TrumpRx. 

The top part of the website also directs women to CPCs, which employ a Trojan-horse-like strategy to mislead pregnant people by luring them in with free services like counseling and pre-abortion screenings—only to deter them from getting abortions. Most recently, the Supreme Court sided with these centers over a case stemming from an accusation that they mislead their patients and donors—thus allowing them to continue systemically dodge accountability and oversight. But it’s also for this reason that they’ve become the perfect front for the administration’s anti-abortion agenda. 

Along with trying to intimidate them out of getting abortions by using predatory methods, many CPCs will also offer bogus treatments like “abortion reversals”—which don’t exist, but which they say can be taken after someone takes an abortion pill.

While most CPCs are religiously backed, they’re also insanely (and unfortunately) lucrative. In Texas alone, a report found that since 2005 to 2024, CPCs have managed to expand their budget from $5 mil. to $140 mil.—and per a 2021 report by the Women’s Law Project, for every abortion clinic in the U.S. there’s an average of about three CPCs. Part of this may be because CPCs serve the interests of big-brother operations wishing to sidestep HIPAA rules, as they aren’t subject to any standards—and are technically not banned from contracting out their information to state governments. 

“Another thing we are seeing here is using anti-abortion [CPCs] gather information about pregnant people who may not understand who they are, information that could be used for all sorts of really disturbing purposes in this moment of criminalization and penalization,” Martin says of this, explaining that once you click a “Find Pregnancy Centers Near You” button, you’re asked for your private information, such as your name, address, the date of your last menstrual period, and the services you’re seeking. (Reminder to take every precaution to protect your medical privacy.) But CPCs have long been positioning themselves to help with the surveillance of pregnant people and abortion seekers—especially amid laws like Texas’ SB 8 and House Bill 7, which use neighborly policing for enforcement.

Speaking about the MomsDotGov release at a press conference in the Oval Office on Monday, Trump reiterated how he’s the so-called “father of fertility”; Medicare and Medicaid Administrator Mehmet Oz repeated claims that one in three Americans are “under-babied,” and HHS Secretary RFK Jr. called the new website “a huge win for the MAHA movement and for the pro-life movement.” None of the three, however, said anything of their dismal attacks to maternal healthcare.