Elon Musk has long claimed civilization will collapse unless we raise the birth rate. Meanwhile, his \u201cDOGE\u201d group is slashing billions in funding for pregnant and nursing mothers and their children.<\/p>\n
When Sevonna Brown learned that Elon Musk\u2019s quasi-governmental Department of Government Efficiency (\u201cDOGE\u201d) had ordered payment stopped on her $2 million plus NIH grant for maternal community healthcare, she started hitting the phones. She was to cease operations immediately, and there was a lot of work in progress that needed to be halted.<\/p>\n
Women on their way to lactation appointments would have to turn around. Home visits helping pregnant and postpartum women with blood pressure spikes and suicidal ideation would be cancelled. Domestic violence shelters for pregnant women would likely shutter, she said, and deliveries of food and formula to new mothers and their babies would stop.<\/p>\n
The network of services for mothers and children that she had spent more than a decade building was coming to a screeching halt. \u201cThe world has literally gone dark,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
Brown is the founder of Sanctuary Medicine & a cooperative member at Restore Forward in Brooklyn, NY. Her work supporting people through pregnancy and new parenthood was funded in part through the NY-CHAMP Maternal Health Research Center of Excellence, which lost support after DOGE cancelled more than $10 billion in grants from the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).<\/p>\n
\n\u201cWe can\u2019t claim to care about birthrates while defunding the very systems that make pregnancy, birth, and parenting safe.\u201d\n<\/p>\n
Emilie Rodriguez, co-founder of The Bridge Directory<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Given Musk\u2019s endless warnings that falling birthrates pose an existential threat to civilization, DOGE\u2019s abrupt gutting of maternal health services is simultaneously ironic, and exactly what you\u2019d expect from an effort whose blunders<\/a> may well exceed<\/a> its claimed, but difficult to verify<\/a>, achievements. A father to an estimated 14 children<\/a>, Musk has said he thinks \u201ccivilization is going to crumble<\/a>\u201d if women don\u2019t have more babies. He has offered his sperm<\/a> to acquaintances and blamed birth control<\/a> for decreasing pregnancy rates. \u201cIt should be considered a national emergency to have kids,\u201d he wrote last summer<\/a>.<\/p>\n
Musk has donated<\/a> millions of dollars to fund research on fertility. But at this point, he has taken much more from pregnant women and new mothers than he has given. In February, DOGE threatened<\/a> a seven-year, $168 million NIH initiative to improve maternal health across the state of Michigan. It suspended more than $27 million<\/a> in grants to women\u2019s health centers, laid off<\/a> federal workers running programs for expecting mothers on Medicaid, and cancelled<\/a> $1.6 million in funding for maternal and postpartum care at the Morehouse School of Medicine in Atlanta, GA.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe can\u2019t claim to care about birthrates while defunding the very systems that make pregnancy, birth, and parenting safe,\u201d says Emilie Rodriguez. A medical anthropologist, doula, and co-founder of The Bridge Directory, a group of perinatal maternal healthcare providers, Rodriguez worked with Sevonna Brown on the CHAMP Center of Excellence grant.<\/p>\n
The CHAMP Center\u2019s grant focused on providing care to women who are Medicaid recipients. In New York City, Black women are nine times as likely<\/a> to die in childbirth as their white counterparts. \u201cNew York City should be one of the safest places in the world to give birth\u2014but for far too many Black and Brown women, it\u2019s not,\u201d said Victoria St. Clair, a doula and community member who helped administer the NY-CHAMP grant. \u201cThe numbers are painful, and the lived experiences behind them are even more so. Still, I want to be clear: no one should be afraid to become pregnant or start a family here \u2026 We believe every person deserves to bring life into this world without risking their own.\u201d<\/p>\n
\n\u201cAnyone who\u2019s had a kid, who\u2019s gone through those early days of parenting, knows the terror of putting your baby to bed and waking up with a jolt asking, \u2018are they still breathing?\u2019\u201d\n<\/p>\n
Leslie Root, Associate Director at the Colorado University Population Center<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Many of the DOGE cuts have been justified as part of an \u201canti-woke\u201d agenda, which aims to cut medical care for traditionally underserved populations. \u201cWe got word that there were words we had to eliminate out of our grants \u2013 like, women, and Black, and undocumented, underserved, immigrants,\u201d Rodriguez explained. \u201cIt\u2019s not just censorship that\u2019s at stake, it\u2019s erasure,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
Whatever their intent, the cuts are likely to worsen healthcare for mothers and children of all races and ethnicity, said Leslie Root, a professor at Colorado University and Associate Director at the school\u2019s Population Center. Root pointed to a recently gutted team at NIH that, until recently, administered the long-standing Pregnancy Risk Assessment Monitoring System (PRAMS) study. The team conducted tentpole research on the unexpected infant deaths previously known as SIDS, or sudden infant death syndrome.<\/p>\n
\u201cAnyone who\u2019s had a kid, who\u2019s gone through those early days of parenting, knows the terror of putting your baby to bed and waking up with a jolt asking, \u2018are they still breathing?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
Donald Trump, like Elon Musk, has expressed a desire to help young Americans who want to start a family. \u201cI\u2019ll be known as the fertilization president,\u201d he said<\/a> last week, as Musk\u2019s DOGE cut funding<\/a> to the Health Resources Services Administration\u2019s Maternal and Child Health Bureau, the NIH\u2019s National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, and the CDC\u2019s Division of Reproductive Health.<\/p>\n
A recently departed staffer from the CDC described layoffs at a team in the Division of Reproductive Health working on a set of federal guidelines for the safe use of contraceptives \u2014 guidelines that are essential to ensuring safe pregnancies in women with conditions like diabetes, high blood pressure, lupus and MS.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe guidelines can be the difference between these women being able to safely start families or not, and in some cases even save their lives,\u201d they said.<\/p>\n
The DOGE cuts have also decimated programs for children\u2019s health. It has terminated<\/a> more than $1 million in grant funding for a children\u2019s behavioral health study in Massachusetts, more than $750,000 to treat kids with respiratory disease at the Seattle Children\u2019s Hospital, more than $200,000 to treat children with skeletal problems at Boston Children\u2019s Hospital, more than $1.6 million in treatment and prevention of HIV in children at the Children\u2019s Hospital of Los Angeles, almost another million in HIV treatment at the Children\u2019s Hospital of Philadelphia, and a whopping $12 billion<\/a> in funding from state health departments, including $2 billion<\/a> earmarked for child vaccination programs. (Child vaccinations have saved an estimated 154 million lives<\/a> over the past 50 years.)<\/p>\n
People affected by the DOGE cuts may not recognize those offices\u2019 names, Sevonna Brown said, but they\u2019ll feel their impact nearly immediately. \u201cThe average pregnant mother sitting in a shelter does not know what HHS is, but she knows what her SNAP benefit is\u2026she knows what her Medicaid card is.\u201d (SNAP helps<\/a> pregnant women and new mothers access food and formula, and Medicaid provides<\/a> health insurance to more than 70 million Americans each year.)<\/p>\n
DOGE has billed itself as a way to cut fat from the federal government, saving taxpayers valuable cash. But Dr. Uma Reddy, who led NY-CHAMP\u2019s work, said that the interventions carried out by her team probably saved taxpayers money. Helping women avoid mental and cardiovascular health crises avoids expensive care down the road, and saves women and their children from needless suffering.<\/p>\n
In recent days, the DOGE cuts have rankled even conservatives and proponents of the Trump Administration’s agenda. Fox News commentator Jesse Waters recently complained to viewers<\/a> of his primetime show that his mother was upset about the cuts, and that his sister \u2014 an employee at Johns Hopkins University \u2014 could be personally affected by them.<\/p>\n
In the meantime, Sevonna Brown\u2019s network of healthcare providers are trying to pick up the slack. \u201cWe\u2019re taking food out of our own fridges. We\u2019re sharing. We\u2019re doing mutual aid. We have to show up for people, we can\u2019t leave people alone. \u2026 We can\u2019t leave a mom who can\u2019t nurse or breastfeed without formula. We are making it happen, and that\u2019s straining our families and our communities.\u201d<\/p>\n
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