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reproductive healthcare
When it Comes to Women’s Health, The Trump Admin’s Hypocrisy is on Full Display
President Donald Trump and his cronies are peddling lies about abortion care while touting their farce advancements for women’s health.
Nov 22, 2025
Earlier this month, Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Marty Makary and Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. made an announcement regarding the removal of broad “black box” warnings from Hormone Replacement Therapy products for menopause.
As an OB-GYN PA with more than a decade of experience in reproductive care, I know what decisions women and patients are grappling with when it comes to their health and maternal care. I also know first hand the devastating consequences of denying patients critical care when they need it the most and stripping access to care that’s been proven to be safe and effective after decades of research.
President Donald Trump and his cronies are peddling lies about abortion care while being hypocrites when touting their farce advancements for women’s health. Right now, Trump and his anti-abortion administration are pulling every string possible to ban abortion and that includes banning abortion medication.
Ironically, Commissioner Makary said in a statement that “women and their physicians should make decisions based on data, not fear,” and anti-abortion extremist Kennedy Jr. said that the administration is “returning to evidence-based medicine and giving women control over their health again.”
Contrary to their assertion of trusting research and doctors, right now, the Trump administration is working to roll back access to mifepristone and reproductive care, with Makary and Kennedy Jr. at the helm.
At the press event for this announcement, while responding to a question from a reporter, Makary said that the administration is “sticking with our philosophy that the government is not your doctor.”
So, which is it? Does this administration trust women and patients to consult their physicians for what’s best on making personal medical decisions, or is that only convenient messaging when it’s pushing forward their extreme agenda?
The healthcare crisis in America is a dire one, and yet, the Trump administration continues to play political games and feign ignorance as to how their efforts to ban abortion nationwide will have a catastrophic impact on women and patients across the country.
It has been 25 years since the FDA approved mifepristone, a safe, effective medication that has reshaped abortion care in the US.
Contrary to their assertion of trusting research and doctors, right now, the Trump administration is working to roll back access to mifepristone and reproductive care, with Makary and Kennedy Jr. at the helm.
At the urging of anti-abortion politicians and junk science, the FDA has agreed to revisit its approval of mifepristone, because extremists condemned the FDA approving a generic abortion pill just last month.
We must continue to call out this hypocrisy, because Republicans know that imposing Project 2025’s abortion agenda risks significant political backlash, particularly in battleground states where abortion is either legal or popular. More than 6 in 10 Americans support keeping medication abortion available. Even many Trump voters oppose new restrictions.
Let’s be clear—this administration’s attacks on mifepristone are a national abortion test.
Project 2025, spearheaded by Trump, Kennedy Jr., and Makary, would dismantle access to one of the safest, most widely used medications in the country. Medication abortion accounted for nearly two-thirds of all US abortions in 2023.
Will women and families retain the ability to make private medical decisions—or will patients have their rights ripped away and be forced to jump through unimaginable hoops just to receive care?
If Republicans were actually committed to prioritizing women’s health in their agenda, they would invest in healthcare so expecting mothers across the country have access to the most comprehensive care available, including abortion care.
If Republicans were actually committed to protecting women and advancing medical research, they wouldn’t pull funding from clinics and hospitals dedicated to providing care for women and patients nationwide, especially in rural communities where resources are already sparse.
I’m not buying this feigned effort toward showing allyship toward women, when everything that this administration has done since January has been an assault on women’s health and the care we undoubtedly need. Physicians and providers like me spend years in schooling and training so we can provide the best care to our communities, and yet this administration undermines those years of dedication and expertise to appease an extreme anti-abortion minority.
If Trump, Makary, and Kennedy Jr. want to walk the walk in advancing women’s healthcare, they should start with looking at themselves and acknowledging the harm that they are doing across the country to the detriment of the American people.
Lives are at stake, and we are waiting for them to mean what they say.
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Will We Give Birth to a Loving or Shackled Future?
A tale of two births challenges us to consider what kind of world we want to create.
Nov 17, 2025
It occurs to me that “giving birth to the future” isn’t simply a metaphor.
I say this as I continue wrestling with infinity—that is to say, working on the book project I began a decade ago: a book about creating peace. My exploration into all this goes beyond politics, global or otherwise. There are countless ways that humanity needs to change and, indeed, is changing. For instance:
For much of the 20th century, the childbirth process in this country didn’t invite a lot of active participation from parents. Mothers in labor were given heavy doses of drugs, and fathers were banished to waiting rooms.
So wrote David Colker in the Los Angeles Times in 2015, shortly after the death of Elisabeth Bing (at age at 100!), the German-born woman who cofounded Lamaze International in 1960 and helped profoundly change the way we birth the future. When she was a young woman, Bing, then living in England, began working as a physical therapist in a hospital. This, Colker wrote, was “when she first viewed childbirth. It was being treated more like a disease, she thought, than a joyous occasion.”
I can’t begin to describe how grateful I am that I was present at my daughter’s birth nearly 40 years ago—not just present but, oh God, part of it.
She helped bring caring and sanity—and love—into the birth process for many (though not all) women, and for men as well, for which I cry hallelujah. Suddenly dads could now be part of the birth process beyond passing out cigars. That’s not even a joke anymore; men, if they’re involved in their child’s birth, have a role larger than sitting in a room with the other soon-to-be dads, waiting for the doc to come in and cry, “It’s a girl!” or “It’s a boy.”
Empowering both women and men—and partnering them—has helped launch a social shift that’s still in progress, bringing men into the core of nurturing, the family’s loving center. I can’t begin to describe how grateful I am that I was present at my daughter’s birth nearly 40 years ago—not just present but, oh God, part of it.
I came home for lunch that day in July and there was Barbara out in the backyard, radiant and excited, weeding the coleus bed. She told me that her water had just broken. She also was feeling slight contractions—light, easy things that mainly seemed to amuse her. They were delightful curiosities. Neither of us was really sure this was true labor, but there was all that fluid leaking all over her panties. We went to the hospital. Almost immediately, Barbara’s contractions turned serious. She went into active labor, and I went into my role as breath-and-contraction helper. Her back pain was severe, but I was always with her, pressing my hand as hard as possible against her back, giving her relief with my counterpressure and breathing—“ahee, ahoo!”—along with her. This lasted about six hours. It was the longest six hours of both our lives.
The only time it got close to desperate was well into the evening. “Talk me out of using drugs,” she begged me. I knew she could make it and gave her all the encouragement I could muster. Turns out she was moving along beautifully. By 8:30 pm she was fully dilated.
Then came the most intense part of the process, the pushing. She was at this for nearly two and a half hours, from 8:30 till the birth at 10:50. In this phase, I added a new duty to the man’s role. I was the guy who counted to 10 during each push. She usually got three pushes in per contraction at this stage. Later—as I saw the hair on the baby’s head appear at the vaginal opening—my role became more than just counter. My encouragement became intense, and linked to the rhythm of Barbara’s pushing. “Come on, Barbara, down and out. Down and out! DOWN AND OUT! COME ON, BARBARA!”
When our daughter finally arrived, I cut the umbilical cord. The nurse put the baby up on Barbara’s stomach, and later I held her, danced around with her. We had brought a radio with us, as our Lamaze teacher had advised: Bring music! As I held Alison Grace, Ravi Shankar began playing the sitar. And our squalling newborn became silent in my arms.
“A gentle birth,” writes Barbara Harper, “takes place when a woman is supported by the people she chooses to be with her during this most intimate time. She needs to be loved and nurtured by those around her.”
But there’s also another type of future we also continue to birth: “My feet were still shackled together, and I couldn’t get my legs apart.”
Beyond the intense torture inflicted on the mother, what in God’s name have we just done to the child?
The words are those of a woman, given the pseudonym Maria Jones, quoted some years ago in an Amnesty International report. She was pregnant and had been arrested for violating a drug law. She was in jail in Cook County, Illinois. When she went into labor, she was handcuffed and shackled to her bed.
“The doctor came and said that yes, this baby is coming right now,” she said, “and started to prepare the bed for delivery. Because I was shackled to the bed, they couldn't remove the lower part of the bed for the delivery, and they couldn't put my feet in the stirrups. My feet were still shackled together, and I couldn't get my legs apart. The doctor called for the officer, but the officer had gone down the hall. No one else could unlock the shackles, and my baby was coming but I couldn't open my legs.”
“Finally, the officer came and unlocked the shackles from my ankles. My baby was born then. I stayed in the delivery room with my baby for a little while, but then the officer put the leg shackles and handcuffs back on me and I was taken out of the delivery room.”
No bonding. No nurturing at the breast. The traumatized infant is whisked off to some antiseptic holding pen to lie alone in its cold new world. This isn’t rational. It’s not even sane. Beyond the intense torture inflicted on the mother, what in God’s name have we just done to the child?
Shackled births were banned in Cook County some years ago, shortly after the Amnesty report was made public. But they were only allowed—indeed, the norm—in the first place because the prisoner-mom, as well as the child, had been dehumanized, in the name of the law, no less. This is the legacy we still must transcend. We owe it to the future.
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'Good Genes,' Anti-Abortion Laws, Declining Birth Rates, and What They Have in Common
Promoting good genes and limiting access to birth control and abortion are inextricably tied by two threads: white supremacy and the patriarchy. And they have been for more than 150 years.
Oct 12, 2025
From American Eagle’s campaign with Sydney Sweeney to the Trump administration’s efforts to limit access to birth control to the US birth rate hitting an all-time low, there has been a lot of noise online this summer, and every time something takes center stage, people come out of the woodwork telling us to not get distracted. To stay focused.
And I get it. I do. It’s a lot.
But we can’t just overlook one headline in favor of another, because in America, promoting good genes and limiting access to birth control and abortion are inextricably tied by two threads: white supremacy and the patriarchy. And they have been for more than 150 years—ever since the first time abortion was criminalized in America in the late 1800s.
In the words of Leslie Reagan (author of When Abortion Was a Crime): “White male patriotism demanded that maternity be enforced among Protestant women.”
When he wrote of American westward expansion, he asked: “Shall [these regions] be filled by our own children or by those of aliens? This is a question our women must answer; upon their loins depends the future destiny of the nation.”
Back in 2022, when Dobbs v. Jackson’s Women’s Health rolled back the protections granted by Roe v. Wade, the justices claimed to have reached the majority ruling, in part, because abortion rights weren’t “deeply rooted in the country’s history and traditions.” But here’s the thing: America had a long-standing tradition of abortion before it became widely outlawed in the late 1800s. In fact, for much of American history, terminating a pregnancy during the first four months wasn’t even considered abortion. It was simply an attempt to “restore menses.”
Before the end of the 19th century, a regular menstrual flow was considered essential to a woman’s health. Herbalists, midwives, and physicians recommended childbearing people sip herbal emmenagogic teas (teas that stimulate menstrual flow) in the days leading up to and throughout the course of their periods to maintain regularity and to restore menstruation if it arrived late.
It was this tradition that politicians and some doctors of the era (specifically those who were a part of the newly-created American Medical Association) wanted to eliminate.
The AMA was founded in 1847, creating a professional group for college-educated doctors (all men at the time). They were faced with a problem: The medical profession was still establishing itself, and so AMA doctors weren’t well-respected in America, but midwives, one of their primary competitors in the field, were. One of the many reasons for this was that midwives were willing to provide abortion services, something AMA-recognized physicians were unwilling to do because they claimed it violated the Hippocratic Oath.
One particular physician, Horatio Robinson Storer, saw abortion as an opportunity to help accredited physicians gain respect: If they could turn abortion into a moral issue, they could destroy public respect for midwives—allowing AMA physicians to take over the field of gynecological health and establish themselves as both the moral and scientific authority on medicine.
With the AMA at his back, in 1857 Storer started a campaign to change the way America thought about abortion—sending letters to physicians and newspapers, publishing books, and eventually working with legislatures to criminalize the practice.
What else was happening in 1857? The lead up to the American Civil War, which we all know was fueled by white supremacy. Not only was much of America fighting for the right to enslave people, they also feared being outnumbered by the very people they were trying to enslave. And with the declining birth rates among white, Protestant women, it was a well-founded fear (and one that wasn’t only limited to the South, especially with the influx of immigrants in northern cities).
Storer used this fear to his advantage.
When he wrote of American westward expansion, he asked: “Shall [these regions] be filled by our own children or by those of aliens? This is a question our women must answer; upon their loins depends the future destiny of the nation.”
The argument was a powerful one—one that changed the way America viewed abortion for 100 years. How did they do it? By destroying the concept of quickening, thereby reclassifying the restoration of menses as abortion and criminalizing those who practiced it. They stated quickening was little more than a feeling, and a feeling wasn’t medicine. This in turn discredited childbearing people as the ones who knew their own bodies best.
The AMA’s efforts culminated in the Comstock Law in 1873, which made the public discussion of birth control and abortion illegal by banning it as obscenity, and by 1880, every state had laws restricting abortion. Early-term abortion, which had once been considered an essential part of women’s healthcare, was labeled evil (and criminal) and midwives were rebranded as abortionists. These views of abortion continued for 100 years until Roe v. Wade gave people with uteruses the right to an abortion, and it’s clear they’ve persisted in the decades since.
Now, to be clear, most doctors today recognize abortion as healthcare. This isn’t meant to demonize modern-day physicians. But as we look to today’s headlines when it comes to the health of childbearing people, it’s almost impossible not to draw parallels, and keep this reality in mind as we fight to regain the rights the Supreme Court has stripped us of.
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