RFK’s Answer to the Maternal Health Crisis: Hide the Data

In April, during a congressional hearing that coincided with Black Maternal Health Week, Rep. Summer Lee (D-Pa.) pressed Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. about the US’ abysmal and largely preventable rates of maternal death compared to its peers.

Black women, Lee pointed out, fare three times worse than their white counterparts, even as the Trump administration continues to cut both health funding and research into racial health disparities.

She posed a question: “How are we going to solve the Black maternal mortality crisis if we cannot say ‘Black’?”

The GOP’s attacks on Medicaid—which finances health care for more than two in five births across the country—and the White House’s termination of thousands of federal health and science workers, including those tasked with compiling the country’s most comprehensive data on maternal and infant health, give even more weight to independent research like Listening to Mothers, a nationwide survey published by the nonprofit National Partnership for Women and Families on Monday.

The report—the group’s first nationwide survey since 2013—surveys thousands of mothers who gave birth in a hospital in 2023 and 2024 about their experiences with the maternal care system, revealing pervasive barriers to quality care and widespread failures by health systems.

The report ends by warning that “modest gains” like expanded postpartum Medicaid coverage “are now at risk of being rolled back.”

Around 40 percent of respondents said they’d been disrespected, dismissed, or ignored by providers during labor and delivery. More than a third reported unmet social needs during pregnancy—mainly a lack of income, difficulty paying utility bills, or finding childcare—particularly Black and indigenous respondents and those on Medicaid. After having their children, more than a fifth said at least one of those needs still hadn’t been met.

Before, during, and after their pregnancies, up to a fourth of respondents reported experiencing depressive symptoms. Symptoms of anxiety were even higher. Yet most people with either symptom received no treatment, even as late as 12 weeks after giving birth. And while research suggests that support from doulas and midwives improves outcomes, only a small fraction of respondents reported having access to or using either.

The report ends by warning that the “modest gains of recent years,” such as the expansion of Medicaid coverage to one year postpartum in all 50 states but Arkansas, “are now at risk of being rolled back.”

“We’re not where we should be,” said Nan Strauss, National Partnership’s senior director of maternal care. “We need to be adding to and improving people’s lives, making it easier for them to focus on their families at this really critical moment, and instead their own efforts to be the best new mom that they can are being undercut every step of the way.”

In July, congressional Republicans enacted major cuts to SNAP and Medicaid; my colleague Daniel Friedman noted at the time that the bill would cost millions of people their health insurance and reduce access to birth control and other reproductive care—imperiling maternity services at more than 140 rural hospitals, as my fellow colleague Nina Martin also reported.

As the administration slashes the social safety net, it’s also suppressing vast amounts ofdata on maternal health. For decades, the Center for Disease Control and Prevention’s Reproductive Health Division partnered with a majority of state health departments to survey tens of thousands of women about their experiences before, during, and after pregnancy as part of the Pregnancy Risk Assessment Monitoring System. But last April, the CDC team that oversaw PRAMS was put on leave, indefinitely cutting off federal support to the states collecting this data. (The termination of thousands of federal workers, including those at the CDC, is currently being challenged in court.)

In the aftermath, said Rita Hamad, a social epidemiologist at Harvard University who has used PRAMS data to research safety net policies like paid parental leave, “some states were not able to continue their data collection, in part because they were losing out on that technical assistance from the CDC.”

“One really heartbreaking example is Mississippi, which stopped data collection for most of 2025,” Hamad said, noting that the state declared infant mortality a public health emergency the same year. “I was just thinking, gosh, how are they going to be able to address this crisis?”

Cassondra Marshall, an associate professor in UC Berkeley’s Maternal, Child, and Adolescent Health Program, has used both PRAMS and Listening to Mothers data in her research. The data is “needed to develop interventions” by policymakers, Marshall emphasized. Yet policies like the Momnibus bills, which were reintroduced in March and seek among other things to expand the perinatal workforce and improve data collection, face an uphill battle in the Republican-dominated Congress.

As my colleague Madison Pauly put it last June, “With the White House and state governments denying the very idea of systemic racism and targeting anything that smacks of [DEI], structural change seems further away than ever.”

To make matters worse, the information the government is releasing isn’t exactly reliable. Last month, on Mother’s Day, HHS launched moms.gov, a website it described as offering “guidance and information to support the health and wellbeing of mothers and their families.” Yet the homepage contains no mention of parental leave or contraception, includes minimal mental health resources, and directs people to crisis pregnancy centers through another website operated by the Christian, anti-abortion Heartbeat International.

For decades, mothers and maternal health experts have been talking about the need for evidence-based, community-focused interventions. Under RFK Jr., public health seems to be moving in the opposite direction.