The Trump administration this week gutted a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention division that monitors in vitro fertilization and tracks national maternal and infant health outcomes, despite President Donald Trump repeatedly insisting that he supports IVF and wants to protect women and children.
The majority of the CDC’s Division of Reproductive Health was laid off on Tuesday, a handful of impacted workers told HuffPost. The team was made up of around 100 highly specialized researchers and scientists, many of whom had worked at the CDC for decades. The layoffs were part of over 20,000 job cuts to the Department of Health and Human Services, which have caused so much disarray that even HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has begun walking back the decision.
Vital federal programs have been disappearing since Trump tasked billionaire Elon Musk with slashing federal dollars under the so-called Department of Government Efficiency. But amid the chaos, it can be hard to discern the real-life impact of these funding cuts.
“If you’re making policy decisions on a hunch, that’s not evidence-based,” one former official in the CDC’s reproductive health division told HuffPost. “Health will likely get worse, and you may not even know it. We won’t see the effects until it’s too late.”
When reached for comment, an HHS spokesperson referred HuffPost to Kennedy’s statement earlier this week, in which he said the mass firings at the department were “about realigning HHS with its core mission: to stop the chronic disease epidemic and Make America Healthy Again. It’s a win-win for taxpayers, and for every American we serve.”
The reproductive health division was made up of three main branches: the Maternal and Infant Health branch, the Women’s Health and Fertility branch and the field support branch. The Trump administration dismantled the latter two. Without them, national data on reproductive health care will quickly become outdated and useless — creating a domino effect of baseless lawmaking that the former officials said will risk the health and lives of millions of American women, pregnant people and children.
“You have to do surveillance, you have to monitor. You can't fix something if you don't know the extent of the problem.”
The now defunct branches were responsible for monitoring IVF cycles nationally and conducting research that made the fertility treatment safer and more successful. One team tracked maternal complications like gestational diabetes and preeclampsia, all of which can have lifelong health consequences for women and their children. The elimination of this team means losing the only source of data about the health and behavior of women before, during and shortly after pregnancy.
One of the teams that has been eliminated published contraceptive guidelines that any U.S. physician speaking to patients about birth control options has used for the last 15 years. That team was also responsible for the CDC’s annual abortion surveillance report, which reflects the number of abortions performed in the U.S. every year and is commonly used by journalists, lawmakers and health experts. Another group ensured that emergency response plans included guidelines for pregnant people and newborns, such as what to do with a woman with gestational hypertension during a hurricane or how to feed a newborn formula without potable water.
“For maternal morbidity, we know that that’s an epidemic,” another former official at the reproductive health division told HuffPost. “We need different ways to combat that, and that’s what this division did. You have to do surveillance, you have to monitor. You can’t fix something if you don’t know the extent of the problem.”
Trump has pledged to expand access to IVF, in spite of his evangelical base’s opposition to the fertility treatment, going so far as to dub himself the “father of IVF” and the “fertilization president.” But his latest actions simply don’t align with his promises.
The team that tracked IVF and other assisted reproductive cycles, the National ART Surveillance System (NASS), monitored 98% of IVF cycles in the U.S. The NASS tracking system was referred to as the gold standard for data collection by multiple sources. The team’s data actually changed the standard of care from multiple-embryo to single-embryo implants for people undergoing IVF, resulting in fewer high-risk pregnancies with twins and triplets.
IVF and other fertility treatments are costly and often not covered by insurance. Former workers in the reproductive health division told HuffPost they know how critical their work was to ensure patients were making the right health care decisions for themselves.
“It’s extremely expensive care. Patients put their savings into trying to have a baby, and there is no other data that can be used to help guide this super important decision,” one former worker in the division told HuffPost.
IVF is a multibillion-dollar industry, with nearly 400,000 cycles performed in the U.S. in 2022. But as the industry expands, the need for government oversight and research is more important than ever. “Where there’s profit, there’s a need for transparency and independent data,” the worker added.
The field support branch worked on the ground in states or other jurisdictions across the country, serving as “a sort of canary in the coal mine to the CDC,” one former reproductive health division worker told HuffPost. The branch included a small team made up of maternal and child health epidemiologists who were essentially front-line workers able to flag early data trends because they lived and worked in the same communities they monitored.
“We know when the measles cases are coming in, we know when a mom has just died from a pregnancy-related complication,” the former worker told HuffPost. “We are there, and we can report back to CDC, ‘Hey, we’re noticing substance use disorders increasing or neonatal abstinence syndrome. We’re noticing moms with COVID are having pre-term deliveries.’”
Most states don’t have the ability to recruit high-level maternal and child health epidemiologists like the ones employed through the CDC’s reproductive health division. But a cost-sharing program introduced in 1986 ensured states received the expertise of highly specialized epidemiologists with federal resources, without having to bear the burden of the full salary and benefits of these workers. The CDC only pays for 20% of those workers’ salaries, and yet their roles were cut under the guise of slashing government spending.
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Federal funding cuts have jeopardized everything from teacher training programs to climate-friendly tree-planting and family planning services. Unfortunately, monitoring and tracking essential reproductive health care for millions of Americans has also been deemed expendable.
“What happens to all of that information? Who’s updating it? Who’s doing it? Those folks at the CDC, they served as a resource to members of Congress, to other agencies, all the time. Where are we going to get that information now?” Barbara Collura, president and CEO of patient-advocacy group Resolve: The National Infertility Association, told HuffPost.
“That’s a lot of information and knowledge that walked out the door.”
