Only a few days into the new year, the Heritage Foundation released its nearly 170-page plan to incentivize higher birth rates, at least within the families it would like to see reproduce. Over the past few months, we’ve also seen officials, and the panelists they invite, in the Department for Health and Human Services push a very narrow prescription for how pregnant patients, predominantly women, should behave; one that looks down upon such noncontroversial things as pain medication, mental health treatment, and the use of formula to nourish one’s baby.
Reproductive rights advocates say these goals work in tandem—and are in keeping with attacks on abortion access that we’ve seen in a post-Dobbs world, focusing on the individual pregnant person’s choices rather than the systemic issues that can impede a healthy life for both pregnant people and their babies, should they decide to have them. Physicians say many of these claims made by health officials are misleading and harmful.
“One of the tools … that women and people who have the capacity for pregnancy have to become equal members of society, to participate in society equally—abortion gave us that right,” said Kulsoom Ijaz, senior policy counsel at Pregnancy Justice, a group that advocates for the rights of pregnant people. “And all of a sudden we’ve taken that tool away. But it isn’t enough for the anti-rights movement. They want to do everything they can to ensure that we no longer have a voice and a seat at the table. That’s what this is about.”
With scant public notice and little transparency, the Food and Drug Administration has held panel discussions on several important health issues, including a July panel on the use of antidepressants during pregnancy. During the discussion, some of the panelists made claims about the harms of these drugs during pregnancy, including a link to autism in kids, that both the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, or ACOG, and the Society for Maternal-Fetal Medicine said were “outlandish” and “unsubstantiated.” It’s unclear if this discussion will result in any official guidance, but advocates for both ob-gyns and their patients say the development is alarming when you consider that suicide is a leading cause of death for pregnant people, along with homicide.
Dr. Camille Hoffman, a professor of maternal fetal medicine in the University of Colorado Anschutz’s School of Medicine’s Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology and Psychiatry, described to The New Republic how she speaks to pregnant patients about antidepressants.
“The goal is for essentially optimal treatment, or in the case of mental health, this idea of the mood being as good as it can be before giving birth because we know the postpartum period is going to be an additional challenge on everybody’s mental health, so that’s how I frame it,” she said. “I talk about antidepressants being some of the most studied medications because they’ve taken such a beating, because they’ve been so stigmatized over the years,