Black maternal health advocates, researchers press on amid federal funding cuts

Yahoo

19-04-2025

Ndidiamaka Amutah-Onukagha, founder and director of the Center for Black Maternal Health and Reproductive Justice at Tufts University, speaks at the Massachusetts State House in Boston. Black maternal health advocates and researchers worry about federal funding cuts. (Courtesy of Birthlooms)
Before everything went black, Tamika Jackson felt like she was drowning. While in labor giving birth to her baby boy, her body felt heavy and her breaths shallow.
'I can't breathe,' she croaked to the anesthesiologist.
'If you couldn't breathe, you wouldn't be able to speak,' she recalled the doctor telling her, dismissing her as having a 'panic attack.'
Minutes later, the 37-year-old's lungs gave out. Her heart stopped beating.
Clinicians were able to resuscitate Jackson. Her baby boy was born via C-section, and the Michigan mom lived to tell her story of giving birth to Cree, who's turning 3 next month.
Jackson is now a maternal health organizer at Mothering Justice, a Michigan-based nonprofit. She spoke with Stateline while on a bus to the Michigan Capitol, where she participated in a Black Maternal Health Week panel and pushed for a legislative package — nicknamed the Michigan Momnibus — which aims to increase obstetric patient protections and improve care for moms of color.
The Michigan Senate passed the package Thursday, and it now heads to the House.
Black moms like Jackson are three times more likely to die than white mothers and suffer higher rates of pregnancy-related complications.
But in its bid to eliminate federal diversity, equity and inclusion, or DEI, initiatives, the Trump administration has terminated community health grants and closed federal offices that support state efforts to tackle racial health disparities. Experts say the moves will hinder efforts to improve Black maternal health.
'DEI is not about politics. It's about survival,' Jackson said. 'This is about community-based solutions — and they're undoing that.'
Jackson added that without federal dollars, 'We're going to be left trying to do a whole lot with a whole lot of nothing.'
The Trump administration has cut grants for maternal health studies and research on health disparities in various populations, including patients of color and LGBTQ people. It has laid off most staff at the federal Division of Reproductive Health, and removed maternal health data from federal agency websites.
It also is considering cutting next year's budget for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services from about $121 billion to about $80.4 billion, according to The New York Times. The administration plans to create a new Administration for a Healthy America, which would focus on maternal and child health, among other issues.
HHS and its National Institutes of Health did not return requests for comment in time for publication.
DEI is not about politics. It's about survival.
– Tamika Jackson, Michigan mom and maternal health organizer at Mothering Justice
Researchers and advocates like Jackson say that amid the Trump administration's erasures, their work will continue.
Among those losing grants are nonprofits, health care systems and universities, including the Morehouse School of Medicine, a historically Black medical school in Atlanta, which received a $2.96 million grant for a center to improve the health of Black pregnant and postpartum women. Georgia has one of the highest maternal mortality rates in the nation.
'We are reviewing the situation to assess how it may affect our research,' a Morehouse spokesperson wrote in an email. 'More broadly, it is important that we all recognize the critical role medical research plays in developing potential life-saving innovation that will mitigate disease and improve the health and well-being of many people.'
The Morehouse center was selected among an initial 10 research centers funded under the NIH's Maternal health and Pregnancy Outcomes Vision for Everyone, or 'IMPROVE,' Initiative.
Columbia University and community groups throughout New York also received the grants. One goal was to connect postpartum moms with doulas to detect conditions such as postpartum preeclampsia, according to principal investigator Dr. Uma Reddy, a professor of obstetrics and gynecology at Columbia. Reddy said the grant was developed with communities who voiced their needs.
'We can actually prevent these deaths and these serious complications,' Reddy said. 'This is a way to focus on a high-risk population and provide them with the resources that they don't have available.'
Maternal death reviews get political as state officials intrude
Tufts University maternal health scholar Ndidiamaka Amutah-Onukagha said she's had several meetings in Washington, D.C., get canceled, and while she's thankful to have almost completed one federal grant project, there's uncertainty about other grants she's applied for, including a Black postpartum support research initiative.
The professor runs the Maternal Outcomes for Translational Health Equity Research (MOTHER) Lab and Center for Black Maternal Health and Reproductive Justice at the Tufts University School of Medicine.
'It not only stalls progress, but it actually actively endangers the most vulnerable among us,' she said. 'These policy decisions can cause and will cause lasting harm to people who are already underserved by our health care system.'
Amutah-Onukagha said she is urging researchers and advocates to have 'cautious optimism.'
'Most people are in the space of gloom and doom. I do get that, and I'm vastly in and out of that,' she said. 'But because of the work that I do in maternal health, we have to remain optimistic. That lens cannot die. If it does, then the communities that we serve are going to be even more disadvantaged.'
Amutah-Onukagha, who recently testified before the Massachusetts Joint Committee on Public Health, said her team will continue to work with organizations around the state, such as Birth Equity & Justice Massachusetts and Resilient Sisterhood Project.
'We're stronger in numbers,' she said.
Diana Greene Foster, research director in reproductive health at the University of California, San Francisco, conducted the seminal Turnaway Study documenting the harms women suffer from abortion denials.
She was in the middle of another study, funded by a federal grant, tracking post-Roe abortions and the efficacy of health exceptions in abortion ban laws. Her team was interviewing emergency room doctors about whether they could provide abortions amid major pregnancy complications such as eclampsia, a serious consequence of preeclampsia, which is a dangerous form of high blood pressure that disproportionately affects Black mothers.
The administration pulled her grant.
Foster, who is fundraising to continue her study, said she feels the administration's actions send a message of 'turning their back on science, on compassion, on caring about women.'
To close racial gap in maternal health, some states take aim at implicit bias
Tina Sherman, a doula and national director of maternal justice at MomsRising, a nonpartisan women and mothers advocacy group, said she worries about data the administration has removed, including the Pregnancy Risk Assessment Monitoring System.
The surveillance system is a comprehensive tool states use to track maternal health and formulate policies to improve it.
'An attempt to erase the data,' said Sherman, 'doesn't erase the harm that has been done and creates additional harm.'
Without data, states can't target where resources are needed and which communities are disproportionately harmed and how, said Sherman, who co-chairs the North Carolina Maternal Mortality Review Committee.
'We're going to be going backwards,' she said.
The Trump administration also canceled several grants focused on intimate partner violence, a leading cause of pregnancy-associated death which disproportionately affects people of color.
One such grant was supporting a University of North Carolina project studying intimate partner violence against pregnant women shortly before they give birth.
'The issues remain. The urgency is pressing as it ever was. The reality is this: Black mothers and birthing people continue to carry the weight of a crisis that we did not create,' Amutah-Onukagha said. 'We did not create it, but we are leading the fight to solve it and dismantle it, and we know that the systemic barriers existed before this administration.
They will continue to show up — but we will also continue to produce cutting-edge research here at the center.'
Stateline reporter Nada Hassanein can be reached at [e-mail].
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