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EVERYTHING
Trump Administration Freezes Family-Planning Grants
What: The Wall Street Journal reports that the Trump administration is freezing $27.5 million in federal family-planning grants to organizations, under the guise of investigating “diversity efforts”. The freeze affects groups like Planned Parenthood, and could suspend funding for pregnancy testing, contraception, STI treatment, and infertility counseling.
Key Line: “Alexis McGill Johnson, president and CEO of Planned Parenthood Federation of America, said: ‘The Trump-Vance-Musk administration wants to shut down Planned Parenthood health centers by any means necessary, and they’ll end people’s access to birth control, cancer screenings, STI testing and treatment, and more to do it.’”
Source: The Wall Street Journal
PREGNANCY AND POSTPARTUM
Pregnancy’s Lasting Impact on the Body
What: Researchers took blood samples from more than 160,000 women to examine (for the first time at that population level) how pregnancy impacts organs like the liver, kidneys, and more. They found that changes continued even 18 months post-delivery.
Key Line: “Notably, the scientists found that while 36 of the markers, including those related to blood clotting, bounced back within a month after delivery, 31 markers took more than 10 weeks to recover. For instance, some changes to the liver and immune system took around 5 months to return to pre-pregnancy levels, and several kidney markers took roughly half a year. Some bone and muscle markers took even longer.”
Source: New Scientist
What to Make of Embryos
What: A deep dive from Anna Louie Sussman in the New York Times on the ethical and legal implications of working with human embryos in scientific research. She weaves her own story in and focuses on the 14-day rule that limits how long embryos can be cultivated.
Key Line: “’Having insight into those stages of development opens this sort of — I don’t want to call it a Pandora’s box,’ Dr. Zernicka-Goetz said, pausing to look for the right metaphor in English. (She grew up in Warsaw, and Polish is her first language.) ‘You’ve uncovered something that you’ve never looked at, and it’s full of gems.’ As the clock ticked toward Day 14, the Cambridge team had to end its experiments in order to stay compliant with the law. …Any gems that lie beyond the 14-day mark remain out of reach.”
Source: The New York Times
ABORTION ACCESS
How America’s Abortion Rate Increased After Roe v. Wade Overturned
What: Salon’s Amanda Marcotte reviews a book that examines how the Supreme Court brought down Roe–but didn’t come close to stopping abortion in America.
Key Line: “There haven’t been hospitals filling up, as they did in the days before Roe v. Wade, with patients mutilated from botched abortions. It’s not because women have, en masse, given up and submitted to forced childbirth. On the contrary, the birth rate continues to decline while the abortion rate went up after the Dobbs decision.”
Source: Salon
The New FDA Commissioner + Abortion Pills
What: Axios reviews all the (manufactured) abortion pill controversies Marty Makary, the newly confirmed FDA commissioner, will face now that he is leading the agency–including the drama that led to his first pick for a top lawyer at FDA to be scuttled.
Key Line: “Makary has already experienced firsthand what a lightning rod mifepristone is shaking out to be. His actions — or inactions — at the beginning of his tenure as FDA commissioner will likely only reinforce that lesson.”
Source: Axios
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