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EVERYTHING
Looking at Trump 2.0’s Potential Changes to Reproductive Health Policy
What: KFF breaks down all the reproductive health-specific policies that could change under the second Trump administration. It includes changes to abortion policy (like potentially banning abortion pills – which HHS nominee RFK, Jr. apparently told senators he was open to), but also lesser-known things like…excluding emergency contraceptives from Medicaid coverage.
Key line: “Federal policymakers have many levers to make major changes that will shape the access and availability of reproductive health including abortion, contraception and maternity care in ways that could affect the whole nation, even in states where the right to reproductive health care is enshrined by the state constitution. In addition to enacting legislation, presidential executive orders, litigation, regulatory actions, and nominations to the judiciary, cabinet, and other leadership position appointments will all affect policy.”
Source: KFF
PREGNANCY + POSTPARTUM
Study: Bird Flu Is Deadly for Pregnant Women
What: A systematic review of 1,500 papers found 30 cases of bird flu in women who were pregnant. Of those cases 90% of the women died, and almost all of their babies died too.
Key line: “MCRI Dr Rachael Purcell said the inclusion of pregnant women as early as possible in pandemic planning must be a key priority. …’Despite being a high-risk population, pregnant women are often excluded from vaccine trials, priority access to therapeutics and delayed entry into public health vaccination programs. A paradigm shift is required to routinely include pregnant women in pandemic preparedness programs to avoid preventable deaths.’”
Source: Emerging Infectious Diseases
Auto-Enrolling Postpartum Women in Follow-up Visits Works
What: MedPage Today digs into a study looking at why more postpartum women don’t go to their primary care doctor in the year after delivery, despite reporting anxiety and depression. The clinical trial treatment group was auto-enrolled in a PCP visit after delivery, the control group was not. The treatment group was 18 percentage points more likely to go see to their PCP.
Key line: “The authors hypothesized that many postpartum individuals at high risk for chronic conditions want to receive care but face multiple barriers to completing a PCP visit in the postpartum period. In this study, default primary care appointment scheduling, tailored SMS messages, and appointment reminders increased PCP engagement.”
Source: MedPage Today
ABORTION ACCESS
Maternity Wards or Abortion Access Clashes?
What: The 19th and KFF Health News look at the closing of hospital maternity wards throughout America, especially in rural communities, and how that can clash with pushes to expand abortion access.
Key line: “’I think if you expanded rural access in this community to abortions before you extended access to maternal health care, you would have an uprising on your hands,’ said Paige Witham, 27, a member of the Baker County health care steering committee and the mother of two children, including an infant born in October.”
Source: The 19th / KFF Health News
Senate Committee Finds Hospitals ‘Deliberately Silent’ on Abortion Guidance
What: The Senate Finance Committee released a report saying that hospital leaders and lawyers have been “conspicuously and deliberately silent” when it comes to giving physicians in abortion ban states directions on what is and is not legal. And in the absence of guidance, women are being maimed or dying unnecessarily.
Key line: “Physicians, whose accounts were anonymized, described hospital lawyers who ‘refused to meet’ with them for months, were ‘pretty much impossible’ to reach during ‘life or death’ scenarios and offered little help beyond ‘regurgitating’ the law, according to the report. Doctors described how other doctors gave out wrong and potentially harmful information, saying that patients could not legally choose their own course of treatment and that doctors could not legally treat ectopic pregnancies, potentially fatal complications in which an embryo develops outside the uterine cavity.”
Source: ProPublica
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