Latest news with #maternalHealth
BBC News
08-07-2025
- Health
- BBC News
Cheltenham support group for mums from different ethnicities
A weekly group aimed at supporting mothers from different ethnicities will launch after one mum said she "never fitted in" at other Nansubuga, a Cheltenham mother-of-four, attended several groups following the birth of her youngest child, now 20 months, but said she struggled as she "never had anything in common with the other mums".Lives of Colour, a Gloucestershire-based race equity charity, will launch the Mothers of Colour group at Aspire Foundation, Cheltenham on Thursday, in partnership with the NHS perinatal maternity Nyasamo, charity founder, said the partnership will allow the health needs of mothers from all ethnicities to be met. National audit programme "Mothers and Babies: Reducing Risk through Audits, External" (MBRRACE-UK) found maternal deaths among black women were nearly three times higher compared with those of white women in Mothers of Colour group will cover newborn care, mental wellness, and maternal Nansubuga said, at the sessions, she hopes to meet mothers who "understand the cultural nuances" she experiences after not "fitting in" previously."Groups are meant to give you rest from the mundane things of motherhood you've been going through at home so, when you go there, you have to feel welcome," she said."But it's not just me, even my baby would think 'I don't look like everybody else here'."When I heard about this group starting up I was super excited because, finally, we have the chance to attend a baby group and be ourselves." Ms Nyasamo said it can be hard for women who have moved from another country to understand the "small nuances" at groups in the UK."It's nice to go into a space where you can just be," she said."We know with the NHS partnership, if we need a midwife or health visitor to come and have a conversation, then we've already got those connections."Whatever the women will ask for, we'll do our best to make sure their needs are met."Mothers of Colour is open to women of all ethnicities.
Yahoo
06-07-2025
- Health
- Yahoo
The GOP's new bill is structural racism at its deadliest
Let's call the Republicans' so-called 'big beautiful bill' what it is: a legislative double-barreled shotgun aimed at the bodies of women, especially Southern women and women who are Black, brown and low-income. One barrel blasts Medicaid access. The other guts Planned Parenthood. The result? A deliberate attempt to kill reproductive freedom, strip women of their basic dignity and destroy what progress this region has made in maternal health outcomes. This isn't just policy. It's punishment. Cutting Medicaid while attacking Planned Parenthood isn't fiscal responsibility. It's a targeted cruelty that hurts women nationwide. But particularly for women in the South — where health systems are already under-resourced, rural clinics are vanishing and maternal mortality rates are similar to those in developing nations — it's nothing short of a death sentence for them and their babies. Let's talk facts. In 2023 in Mississippi, 57% of births were covered by Medicaid. In Louisiana, it was 64%. These aren't just statistics. These are lives — sisters, daughters, mothers and aunties — trying to survive a system designed to abandon them. In many rural ZIP codes, Planned Parenthood is the only accessible provider of cancer screenings, contraception, prenatal maternal care and postpartum care. Gutting its funding while simultaneously choking Medicaid is like setting fire to the only lifeboat in a flood. Let's be even more real: If you are a woman living in rural Louisiana, Mississippi, Arkansas or Alabama, this bill doesn't just inconvenience your access to care. It incinerates it. In rural Southern counties, hospitals have shut down their labor and delivery units in droves. Some counties don't have a single practicing OB-GYN. That's not a policy failure — that's an egregious policy choice being carried out with surgical precision. Imagine being six months pregnant, with no car and no public transit and with the closest provider two hours away — if it's even taking Medicaid patients. That's not health care. That's sanctioned neglect. Rural women — especially Black, Indigenous and Latina women — have been treated like afterthoughts for generations. But now, they're being treated like collateral damage in a culture war they didn't ask to be in. This is structural racism at is deadliest. If you're a lawmaker who's gutting access to women's reproductive while smiling for photo ops at church on Sunday, understand this: Every rural woman who dies from a preventable complication, every baby born undernourished because its mother couldn't access prenatal care, every ZIP code that loses a clinic because of these budget cuts is your fault. These attacks aren't incidental. They are ideological. They are part of a long game to control women's bodies while criminalizing their autonomy — especially in Black and brown communities. It's no coincidence that the same states eager to shred Medicaid expansion are the ones leading the charge against abortion rights, denying gender-affirming care to trans youths and standing opposed to the very notion of care as a public good. That's exactly why we released 'Shift the South,' groundbreaking report rooted in the lived realities and leadership of women and girls of color across the American South. It maps the merciless, maniacal movement to suppress autonomy, erase reproductive justice and underfund communities into silence. But it also lifts up the blueprint for transformation — investing in Southern women as agents of change, not casualties of policy. It's more than data — it's our declaration. And in the face of cruelty disguised as governance, we offer clarity, courage and counterstrategy. What's left when the clinic closes, the OB-GYN relocates and the Medicaid card is worthless? Silence. Suffering. Stillbirths. We've been here before. But we refuse to die quietly this time. At the Women's Foundation of the South, we refuse to act as if women are disposable. We know that maternal health, reproductive access and community wellness aren't luxuries — they are basic rights. This bill? It's not just bad policy. It's a betrayal. We will fight it — not just with data and dollars, but with the righteous rage of every grandmother who buried a daughter too soon, every mother who had to drive 200 miles for care and every young girl growing up in a state that sees her more as a womb than a whole human being. Republicans Thursday passed their bill that cuts Medicaid and defunds Planned Parenthood, and Friday, President Trump signed it into law. They should all be aware, though, of the rage they've unleashed in women — in the South and across the country — who don't plan to sit around silently and die. This article was originally published on
Medscape
25-06-2025
- Health
- Medscape
Partnership Promotes Indigenous Mothers' Reproductive Health
Canada's Indigenous History Month is an appropriate time to examine the efforts that the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) are taking to improve Indigenous health trajectories within the First Nations, Inuit, and Métis communities. Many of these efforts flow through the agency's Indigenous Healthy Life Trajectories Initiative (I-HeLTI), which is dedicated to creating transparent, community-first approaches to research and healthcare delivery. 'The goal of I-HeLTI is to identify culturally strengthening strategies crucial for improving maternal and child health outcomes in Indigenous communities,' Chelsea Gabel, PhD, scientific director of the Institute of Indigenous Peoples' Health at CIHR and associate professor of Indigenous studies and health, aging, and society at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, told Medscape Medical News. Gabel is a Red River Métis. Chelsea Gabel, PhD 'Research shows that First Nations, Inuit, and Métis people experience significantly higher rates of noncommunicable diseases, as well as issues around maternal health and poor health outcomes in general,' she said. Research on Indigenous communities historically has focused on deficits. 'This means that it's focused on a larger problem (eg, Indigenous people are more likely to have diabetes or drink more) vs looking at [the role played by] factors like intergenerational trauma, the residential schools system, and social determinants of health.' I-HeLTI aims to change this focus. Community-Integrated Care I-HeLTI is based on a Developmental Origins of Health and Disease approach, which suggests that environmental factors (namely social determinants of health like poverty, racism, housing, and geographical location) interact with genes during conception, the pre- and postnatal and infancy periods, and early childhood to affect later health outcomes. The initiative has an international component in countries like China, India, and South Africa, as well as the World Health Organization. Several Indigenous projects are active in Canada, including Aunties Within Reach (AWR) in the Wood Buffalo region in Alberta. AWR is a collaborative partnership between the University of Alberta's Collaborative Applied Research for Equity in Health Policy and Systems (CARE) Lab and the Ihkapaskwa Collective. The CARE Lab is an applied health policy systems team that studies and designs, implements, and evaluates programs with community partners to develop locally tailored, context-based solutions. The Ihkapaskwa Collective is an Indigenous-founded and Indigenous-led nonprofit focused on providing accessible, community-centered reproductive healthcare. 'AWR is an excellent model of community-integrated care,' said Stephanie Montesanti, PhD, associate professor of public health at the University of Alberta, Edmonton, and head of the CARE Lab. The partnership is not only delivering reproductive health services directly in the community but also engaging with providers across health and social sectors, she explained. Stephanie Montesanti, PhD When Montesanti joined I-HeLTI, she wanted to explore the opportunity to bring the program to the Wood Buffalo regional municipality, where Sheena Bradley, Ihkapaskwa founder and executive director, had been working. Sheena Bradley Bradley, a Cree-Métis full-spectrum birth worker and clinical herbalist, cofounded AWR with Maddie Amyotte, a Cree-Métis registered Indigenous midwife, and Shelby Weiss, a Sturgeon Bay Cree full-spectrum birth worker. Bradley said that AWR provides reproductive health support that mirrors the way that traditional 'aunties' would, when and where mothers, families, and the community needed it most. But funding has been tight. 'The CARE Lab reached out to us to partner on the I-HeLTI initiative, and we spent a good portion of a year building relationships and learning what the research would look like in our community,' said Bradley. 'Would it be led by us and families and elders in the community?' she said. 'There's a few elders on that team from various communities that are really helping guide [the CARE Lab's] research and what they see fits as research being brought into the community,' said Bradley. 'But there's also natural guidance from our grandmothers, the elders that we work with every day, and the families we support. That's what is meant by the phrase 'guided by community.'' The goal was to bridge the gap and improve access to reproductive health services, said Montesanti. Indigenous Birth Practices Since the 1960s, Canada has relied on maternal evacuation, which transfers Indigenous pregnant women from Canada's rural, remote regions to urban hospitals to give birth. The strategy was created to address disparities in maternal and child outcomes. It has been linked, however, to emotional, social, and cultural harms, as well as maternal and neonatal infections. 'Within our municipality, which is massive in land size and home to 13 First Nations and Métis communities, a lot of mothers are evacuated for birth, leave their home community and their support systems to come into town, where they are then scrutinized for not having healthy supports,' said Bradley. 'As soon as they leave their nation and go into town to deliver their baby, they are placed under Provincial rather than Tribal Child Family Services. It's hard to navigate between the two and figure out who's responsible for who and what,' she added. 'You can imagine when people are coming from a remote community to an urban center and hospital setting, it's going to be uncomfortable.' 'These services are offered by the mainstream health system, which is not necessarily culturally safe or culturally relevant,' added Montesanti. On the other hand, full-spectrum birth workers are both aunties and care providers. 'They play important roles around social, cultural, and outreach support, as well as [providing] mentorship and traditional teachings related to reproductive health, like breast or infant feeding, postpartum care, mental health and well-being, and social well-being,' she explained. The CARE Lab ensures an ongoing cycle of implementation learning (ie, identifying best practices, linking volunteers to them, identifying similar programs that have been implemented in other contexts, and bringing the lessons they offer to AWR). In alignment with I-HeLTI requirements, the lab also is creating a pregnancy cohort. AWR is stretched to capacity. In addition to Bradley and Amyotte, a Métis nurse practitioner runs a private primary care practice and has hospital privileges in Fort McMurray. Carlee Myette, a Métis auntie navigator or all-around advocate, guides families through basic needs supports like housing, food, mental health referrals, and navigating Child and Family Services. Kaylen Duke, a Chipewyan Prairie Dene, is community engagement coordinator and research assistant and operates as a liaison between the Aunties and the CARE Lab team, which, in addition to Montesanti, includes research assistant Nicole Orji, a First Nations Iroquois. Kaylen Duke 'What can be a model for other communities is the fact that AWR is helping to reclaim traditional practices and knowledge; it's bringing culture and ceremony back to birth,' said Orji. 'Many of our nations are matrilineal. Through the process of reconciliation and the mainstream Western medicine model, we have lost not just our mothers, but Indigenous people in general have lost our autonomy, choices, rights, and control over our reproductive freedoms,' she said. 'A lot of the work that the Aunties Within Reach program is doing is repairing some of those harms,' said Orji. Nicole Orji Gabel, Montesanti, Orji, Bradley, and Duke reported having no relevant financial relationships.
CNN
25-05-2025
- Health
- CNN
Trump wants a ‘baby boom,' but an ultra-conservative agenda may hurt IVF access
Donald Trump Maternal health Abortion rightsFacebookTweetLink Follow The recent attack on a California fertility clinic has placed in vitro fertilization back into the national spotlight, but experts in the field say that a conservative focus on natural conception is an even bigger threat to IVF access. The car explosion outside the Palm Springs clinic last weekend injured four people and killed the attacker. Authorities are looking into the suspect, including potential links to anti-natalism, the concept that procreation itself is unethical. Those kinds of fringe ideas don't pose a real political threat to IVF access, reproductive health experts say. Still, the Palm Springs incident is contributing to an increasing unease providers and families are feeling at IVF clinics around the country. While around 2% of babies born in the US are conceived through IVF, some religious groups who view embryos as people oppose the treatment because of the storage and discarding of embryos. And providers are warning anti-abortion policies that seek to give embryos and fetuses the same legal rights as people, known as fetal personhood, also pose a threat to IVF access. After trending downward for decades, the US fertility rate has been hovering near a record low. President Donald Trump and key figures in and around the administration want to change that with a 'baby boom' and are considering incentives like a $5,000 'baby bonus' for new parents. Trump also issued an executive order seeking recommendations to protect IVF access and reduce costs. The White House has said Trump is now reviewing those recommendations. CNN has reached out to the White House for comment. While the administration has been seeking counsel from some providers and experts, one of the nation's most prominent IVF medical and advocacy groups, the American Society for Reproductive Medicine, told CNN it has been notably excluded from the conversation. The organization made multiple attempts to reach members of the administration and received no response, Sean Tipton, the group's chief advocacy and policy officer, said. Tipton's organization has been sounding the alarm about misleading terms like 'restorative reproductive medicine,' which it says is being used to promote ideas that could eventually hinder access to IVF treatment. The term has gained traction among the Make American Healthy Again movement and conservative groups who emphasize 'natural solutions,' like nutrition changes and cycle tracking, rather than treatment like IVF for infertility. The Heritage Foundation, a conservative group that authored Project 2025, has promoted the idea, while framing IVF as a treatment that ignores underlying health problems. The American Society for Reproductive Medicine insists restorative reproductive medicine is 'not a new solution or a distinct specialty. It emphasizes treatment of underlying infertility causes, which fertility doctors already do for every patient, and may not address all fertility challenges, such as male factor infertility or blocked fallopian tubes.' There's a lot of misleading medical information on the internet, but not all of it reaches the highest levels of government and policymaking. 'You have to address it, because the political organizations that have promulgated (restorative reproductive medicine) have the ear of many Republicans, including people in the White House,' Tipton said. 'They want to confine people to medical technology that was frozen in the 1970s, and we think people ought to have access to good, cutting edge 21st century care.' Sean Tipton, ASRM chief advocacy and policy officer The push toward natural conception also notably excludes LGBTQ needs. Kerrie King, a 29-year-old who runs a family farm in Mississippi, said she and her wife have been trying to have a child through IVF for over two years. After plenty of searching, they were able to find an LGBTQ friendly fertility clinic two hours from their small town. King and her wife have watched the ways in which the Trump administration has come after the rights of trans and other LGBTQ Americans, and they fear for what that could mean for their own family. 'We hope to continue treatment, but with the executive order up in the air at the moment, we have kind of come to a standstill because of Trump's presidency and how he might restrict access to fertility treatment for LGBT Americans,' King told CNN. Toeing the line between public support for IVF and a conservative turn against it may prove difficult for the president, who once called himself the 'father of IVF.' Last year, the Alabama Supreme Court ruled frozen embryos are considered human beings and those who destroy them can be held liable for wrongful death, leading fertility clinics throughout the state to pause IVF treatments. Chaos ensued for families who faced losing their shot at a baby, along with the steep amounts of money they invested in fertility treatments. Families, providers and advocates rallied at the state Capitol, while Alabama lawmakers scrambled to remedy the decision. Soon after, the governor signed a bill into law aimed at protecting IVF patients and providers from legal liability. Fertility clinics reopened their doors the next day, and the swift backlash against the court's decision was framed as a win for proponents of IVF. But the issue of fetal personhood at the heart of the Alabama court's decision isn't going away, says University of California, Davis Law Professor Mary Ziegler, and the public backlash has not deterred other states from wading into the debate. While the Supreme Court declined to take up a fetal personhood case in 2022, Kansas recently passed a law requiring child support payments cover embryos and fetuses. And Florida lawmakers are advancing a bill allowing parents to seek civil damages for the wrongful death of an embryo or fetus. The Southern Baptist Convention, the nation's largest Protestant body, also passed a resolution last year asserting embryos are human beings and urged its members to weigh the 'ethical implications' of IVF. Experts say these policies advance fetal personhood. The goal is to end abortion rights nationwide – but it could also mean devastating consequences for IVF treatment, the way so many families in Alabama experienced firsthand last year. In fact, Ziegler says the most prominent threat to abortion rights and IVF access are one and the same. 'Anti-abortion activists who are the most extreme have also started protesting outside of IVF clinics the way they protest outside of abortion clinics,' Ziegler said. While many are anxiously awaiting word from the White House on those IVF policy recommendations, Ziegler said she's watching the courts. 'It's more likely that Trump would nominate judges who believe in a legal theory of fetal personhood, and those judges could reach a ruling with really negative impacts on IVF,' she said. 'And he wouldn't have his fingerprints on it.' 'To some degree, we've seen this movie before,' she added. 'The most significant changes with respect to abortion in the first Trump administration were not policies that Donald Trump signed into law or executive orders. They were from courts.'
Yahoo
09-05-2025
- Health
- Yahoo
‘Dismantling one of the strongest tools we have': Conservatives fret HHS cuts
The Trump administration's decision to gut reproductive health research is alarming some conservatives, who worry it undercuts the president's pro-family agenda. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. laid off thousands of federal employees last month, including about 80 who worked at the Centers for Disease Control's Division of Reproductive Health, according to three former CDC staffers granted anonymity to speak candidly on agency dynamics. The office collected state and national data on live births, abortion trends and fertility treatment outcomes — the kind of information policymakers rely on to assess and improve maternal and infant health care, said Isaac Michael, a former HHS statistician who worked on the Pregnancy Risk Assessment Monitoring System before he was laid off. 'If you cut PRAMS, this is dismantling one of the strongest tools we have to prevent maternal deaths, to reduce infant mortality and to close socioeconomic health gaps,' he said. Michael — who said he voted for President Donald Trump in 2024 based on his anti-abortion stance and supports the president's push to rein in federal spending — said ending PRAMS contradicts the administration's pro-family messaging. By tracking maternal health behaviors before, during and after pregnancy, Michael said the PRAMS team helped identify health disparities, evaluate the effectiveness of Medicaid and Women, Infant and Children (WIC) programs for pregnant people and understand causes of preterm birth and infant death. 'Without it, we are flying blind,' Michael said. 'We lose the ability to see where we are failing mothers and babies until it's too late.' Trump and members of his administration have been silent on the cuts. The White House did not respond to requests for comment about the future of the division's gutted programs. HHS spokesperson Emily Hilliard said in a statement to POLITICO that 'critical programs' from the CDC's Division of Reproductive Health 'will continue under the Administration for a Healthy America (AHA) alongside multiple agencies and programs to improve coordination of health resources for American.' PRAMS was one of multiple research teams within the division's women's health and fertility branch, which was wiped out by the layoffs, former CDC employees said. A fertility epidemiology studies team within the branch helmed projects like the CDC's contraception guidance for healthcare providers and an annual abortion surveillance report, which collected voluntary data about legal abortions. The division's field support branch, which deployed epidemiologists to states to improve maternal care, is also gone. The cuts come as more American women died around the time of childbirth last year, reversing a two-year decline, according to provisional data released last month. Patrick T. Brown, a fellow at the conservative Ethics and Public Policy Center, called the layoffs 'short-sighted,' suggesting it could backfire on the Trump administration's pro-family message. 'Especially if we're going to be pumping more money or more rhetorical power into IVF or … maternal mortality, an area with a lot of bipartisan support, we should be investing in the kind of research that helps inform those debates and approaches,' he said. Brown, whose work focuses on pro-family economic policy, said the cuts may force conservatives to rely on abortion surveillance data from groups like the Guttmacher Institute, a pro-abortion rights think tank. On IVF, Brown noted that while not all conservatives support expanding its access through federal mandates, basic data on usage and success rates is still necessary to inform proper policymaking. 'This is the kind of basic statistics gathering that there's just not really a good free market solution for,' Brown said. 'Collecting data like this is a pretty classic function of government and it's not something that you can rely on private industry or even academic institutions to do in the same scope or scale.' Still, Brown is not convinced the programs are 'gone for good.' He said he suspects the Trump administration will eventually reconsider the cuts. Even groups hesitant to criticize Trump directly are sticking up for PRAMS. 'Tools like PRAMS have real value when they're used to support vulnerable populations and guide evidence-based care,' Mary Hodges, vice president of the National Association of Pro-Life Nurses, said in a statement to POLITICO. 'If this program is being phased out, we would encourage the development of new, transparent systems that preserve those strengths while aligning with a pro-life framework.' PRAMS was temporarily paused earlier this year while HHS reviewed the program's compliance with the Trump administration's executive orders, according to Michael and the three other former CDC staffers. The team was greenlit to resume some operations in April — but then the workforce reduction hit, one former CDC staffer told POLITICO. A congressionally-mandated team working on assisted reproductive technology — the most common type being in vitro fertilization — was also a casualty of the layoffs. While some conservatives support the cuts as part of an overarching goal of shrinking the federal government, others fear it could weaken public health policy efforts that align with their values. Trump has made boosting birth rates and access to IVF a key plank in his agenda, referring to himself as the 'fertilization president,' during a Women's History event at the White House in March. And in February, Trump signed an executive order aimed at expanding access to IVF and reducing out-of-pocket costs. But those critical of the cuts are largely reluctant to criticize the Trump administration to avoid jeopardizing higher-profile goals, like reinstating strict FDA regulations on the abortion drug mifepristone. One leader at a national anti-abortion organization, granted anonymity to discuss sensitive dynamics without upsetting allies in the Trump administration, said while he personally was "really sad to see" the programs eliminated, neither he nor anyone else he knows in the movement is planning to speak out against them. "We can't just be the party of cutting," this leader said. "We also need to support life and support women." Mayra Rodriguez, state director for the anti-abortion group Moms for Arizona, said when she voted for Trump she hoped he would purge federal agencies of ideological bias — not cut maternal and infant health research. "Their data needs to be better, but again, it is their data that has helped us pass a lot of legislation that protects life,' said Rodriguez, who worked for Planned Parenthood before joining the anti-abortion movement. Rodriguez said the CDC's abortion surveillance report has helped identify the gaps and inconsistencies in state-level abortion reporting, aiding the passage of legislation that monitors post-abortion complications among women. She pointed to an Arizona law passed in 2018 that revised the state's abortion reporting requirements, mandating health care providers to report specific complications, including 'incomplete abortion retaining part of the fetus requiring reevacuation.' "If we truly care about women and children, we need the data to improve health outcomes, and removing groups or organizations that do that contradicts the pro-life stance that we value both the mother and the child,' she said. For now, the division's Maternal and Infant Health branch remains — spared from the layoffs. But according to an HHS announcement about the department restructuring, the so-called Administration for a Healthy America will tackle maternal and child health issues, leaving the future of the branch uncertain. One former staffer warned that the remaining employees can't absorb the lost workload. "They won't be able to do it,' the staffer said. 'There are so few experts in this topic area throughout the country … they don't have the time or ability or institutional knowledge to continue these programs.' Alice Miranda Ollstein contributed to this report.
