Trump’s Health and Human Services Department has been taking a hatchet to vitally important, lifesaving programs and research, especially involving reproductive health, claiming that researchers, health providers, and federal employees are promoting “DEI.” On Wednesday, the 19th reported another alarming casualty: Diana Greene Foster, the researcher behind the landmark Turnaway Study, lost a grant from the National Institutes of Health to study the impacts of state abortion bans on patients.
Over 10 years, the Turnaway Study, for which Foster received a MacArthur Genius Grant, followed thousands of people who both had abortions or were unable to access abortion, and found that those who were denied care were substantially more likely to live in poverty or be entrapped in abusive relationships, among other devastating circumstances. Foster’s been in thee process of following up this research in the wake of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health—the Supreme Court case that overturned Roe v. Wade–when she received a letter from the NIH informing her that “research programs based on gender identity are often unscientific, have little identifiable return on investment, and do nothing to enhance the health of many Americans.” This is similar to letters other researchers have received, including one who was told her program to address gaps in research on the impacts of domestic violence on high rates of maternal mortality no longer qualifies for funding because of its “amorphous equity objectives.” The Pregnancy Risk Assessment Monitoring System (PRAMS), which studies the massive race and class disparities in maternal mortality, also lost funding for a similar reason.
Foster told the 19th that her team has thus far used less than $200,000 from an anticipated $2.5 million in NIH support to be spread over five years. While she intends to continue the study, she’ll now be forced to use valuable time fundraising to keep it alive: “I am madly fundraising to replace these canceled funds,” she said. “I would rather be spending the time implementing the study than beginning the fundraising again.”
Since Dobbs, we’ve heard countless stories of people who have almost died as a result of being denied a timely emergency abortion for pregnancy complications. “It is very likely that certain types of people are less likely to be able to get a wanted abortion. And I think that includes people who experience pregnancy complications and are too sick to travel across state lines,” Foster told the 19th. “Some cases make the newspapers but only systematic study can tell us how often it happens, quantify the added health risks of the law and help us understand how to mitigate the harms.” She explained that her study will “rigorously examine how state abortion bans—with and without health exceptions—affect treatment of medical emergencies… a topic for which we desperately need data.”
Foster said that before receiving the letter from NIH, her team was set to publish a first batch of data revealing that in abortion-banned states people are now more likely to seek abortions in their second trimester than they were before Dobbs. This reflects what abortion providers and advocates have anecdotally shared. In 2024, the Brigid Alliance, which provides funding support to people forced to travel out-of-state for abortion, prioritizing abortion seekers who are later in their pregnancies, told Jezebel they’re supporting more clients who are often further along in their pregnancies post-Dobbs.
The Trump administration seems to be indiscriminately gutting funding for research, with some researchers suspecting that HHS is using AI to target studies that include words like “diversity” or “equity.” At the same time, anti-abortion officials are deliberately trying to conceal the horrific impacts of their laws, and this seems part and parcel of that strategy. Foster’s study will present quantitative analysis and interviews with people who have successfully and unsuccessfully sought abortions since Dobbs, which, since 2022, has allowed nearly half of states to enact total or near-total abortion bans. Her research is all the more vital as abortion-banned states are increasingly trying to disband, bury, or obstruct the work of maternal mortality committees that track pregnancy and birth-related deaths and morbidities.
Foster’s research would also assess a range of other factors, like the economic impacts of being denied abortion after Dobbs, or the economic impacts of jumping through all the necessary hoops to travel for it. “The problems, the complications, the costs [from abortion bans]—it’s unending,” Serra Sippel, executive director of Brigid, told Jezebel last year. She’s heard of people who have lost their jobs from being forced to miss work, as well as people who lost significant wages from missing work, and consequently struggled to pay rent and cover other living costs. “It can set them back for a long time. The short-sightedness of imposing these bans, the impact it has on the economic infrastructure when so many people are going to lose wages, lose jobs, lose housing—the ripple effect is massive.”
And, just as the Turnaway Study found people denied abortion care were more likely to be entrapped in abusive relationships, early, alarming data suggests abortion bans are already carrying disparate harm for abuse victims. In 2023, the National Domestic Violence Hotline reported that calls about reproductive coercion (when an abuser exerts control over someone’s pregnancy-related decisions) doubled in the first year since Dobbs. The Hotline later found that abusers are citing abortion bans to threaten to report or sue their partners who are considering abortion, and that the rapid shuttering of reproductive health clinics is denying victims a key avenue to seek help.
We’re constantly learning about the toll of abortion bans—but Foster’s study would present a first-of-its-kind, comprehensive look at post-Dobbs life, and so, unsurprisingly, the Trump administration sabotaged it.
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