Black maternal health efforts face unclear future under Trump

• Ongoing studies include how to prevent the higher risk of major complications from postpartum hemorrhage, a leading cause of maternal deaths, faced by Black women.

State of play: The concern is that President Trump's sweeping executive order could derail efforts to improve early diagnosis, treatment and prevention of pregnancy and birth complications, and data collection on maternal deaths.

• The recent removal of federal health dashboards and datasets left providers and researchers shaken, and concerned that their federal support could disappear.

Case in point: Ndidiamaka Amutah-Onukagha, an assistant dean and professor at Tufts University, receives National Institutes of Health funding to research maternal health inequities among Black women. She hasn't heard anything from her contacts at NIH about the status of the grant since Trump's executive order, she said.

• Her research center just applied for another NIH grant to study postpartum mental health interventions with a focus on Black women.
• "If it gets reviewed, is it going to be reviewed competitively? And then who is still participating in the review process?" Amutah-Onukagha said. "All these things are kind of at play, and I think that's very concerning."

Health and Human Services did not respond to Axios' request for comment. A Centers for Disease Control and Prevention webpage on reducing Black maternal mortality is available online.

The push against DEI could also curtail opportunities for aspiring Black physicians, nurses, midwives and other health providers. Studies show that having a clinician from the same racial background can improve a patient's experience.

• The Trump administration is "green-lighting discrimination by rolling back these [DEI] initiatives," said Jamila Taylor, CEO of the Institute for Women's Policy Research.
• More discrimination will only deepen maternal health inequities faced by Black Americans, she said.

Zoom in: CDC data released earlier this month shows that 50.3 Black mothers died out of every 100,000 live births in the U.S. in 2023. That's compared with 14.5 deaths for white people, 12.4 for Hispanic people and 10.7 for Asian people.

• Black people were the only racial or ethnic group to see an increase in maternal mortality between 2022 and 2023.
• The Biden administration devoted significant time and resources to addressing racial disparities in maternal health, but the new funding sources and coverage expansions need more time to make a difference, said LaTasha Seliby Perkins, an assistant professor at the Georgetown University School of Medicine.

• A link to the Biden administration's maternal health action plan that was hosted on the White House website appears to have been offline since President Trump's inauguration.
• "We've spent hundreds of years building these systems and having these disparities," Seliby Perkins said. "It's going to take more than two or three years to fix it."

What we're watching: HHS Secretary-designate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said he'd continue to address maternal mortality if confirmed, but he's been noncommittal about interventions to decrease racial disparities in maternal health.

• He refused to provide a yes or no answer when Sen. Lisa Blunt Rochester (D-Del.) asked during a confirmation hearing whether he'd consider programs that target maternal mortality in Black women as "health DEI programs."
• Kennedy said in response to written questions that he'd examine and address the drivers of maternal morbidity and mortality to improve outcomes "across demographics."

The bottom line: "There's not a lot that I can say with confidence right now" about how the new administration will approach maternal health for Black women, said Tufts University's Amutah-Onukagha.

• "I'm a glass-half-full person, and I do know that even in situations of disruption and situations of crisis, there are good people still working in these places," she said.