05/28/2026
This just in!
"One in three Americans are under-babied." That was Dr. Mehmet Oz, the daytime TV doctor turned head of Medicare and Medicaid, speaking from the Oval Office -- defining the term as Americans who "either don't have any children or have less children than you would normally want to have."
The Trump administration's solution, announced alongside RFK Jr. at a recent White House event, was the launch of a new federal website whose first listed resource directs pregnant women to a network of 2,750 anti-abortion crisis pregnancy centers -- faith-based facilities that present themselves as medical clinics but often provide scientifically inaccurate information from staff with no medical training, and that exist to dissuade women from terminating their pregnancies.
What Dr. Oz -- who currently holds the second-most powerful health position in the country after the HHS Secretary -- failed to acknowledge is that the women he is calling "under-babied" live in the wealthy country where it is most dangerous to give birth. The United States has the highest maternal mortality rate among high-income countries, and more than 80 percent of those deaths are preventable, according to the CDC.
The United States is also the only wealthy country that does not guarantee paid leave for new mothers. Childcare in many U.S. counties now costs more than rent. The average American family with two young children pays roughly $28,000 a year for childcare. Not a single state in the country meets the federal definition of "affordable" childcare.
More than a third of U.S. counties are now "maternity care deserts" -- areas with no hospital, birth center, or obstetric provider offering pregnancy care -- and 5.5 million American women live in counties with no or limited access to maternity care. Since the end of 2020, 133 rural hospitals have stopped delivering babies or announced they will, a 12 percent reduction in rural labor and delivery units in five years. Only 41 percent of U.S. rural hospitals still offer obstetric care.
And in the states this administration champions, having a baby has become significantly more dangerous. A Johns Hopkins study published this spring found that pregnancy-associated deaths rose 9.2 percent in the 14 states that banned abortion after Dobbs. A ProPublica investigation found that sepsis rates in second-trimester pregnancy loss hospitalizations soared in Texas after the ban, as doctors delayed care while women waited to become sick enough to qualify for medical intervention. Maternal mortality, meanwhile, fell 21 percent in states where abortion remained legal. Today, 62.7 million American women live under state abortion bans.
The administration telling them they aren't having enough babies has cut Title X funding for the contraception and cancer screenings millions of women rely on, while making the act of carrying a pregnancy to term measurably deadlier in much of the country.
Women aren't "under-babied." As Dr. Nisha Patel observed, "Women are: Under supported. Underpaid. Under childcared. Under slept. Under parental leave’d. Under helped at home. And somehow still expected to keep society running on broken sleep and a granola bar."
The women aren't failing. The country is failing them.
Image credit: National Organization for Women (NOW) / Quote: IG Dr. Nisha Patel
