“We’re working with agencies across 20 Michigan counties – that have more than 7 million people in them – to be able to improve services so that moms don’t get sick and die,” said Dr Jennifer E Johnson, a Michigan State University public health professor who helps run one of the research centers in Flint, Michigan.
On Tuesday, a few days after the Trump administration announced its plan to slash billions of dollars in funding for biomedical and behavioral research, an investigator at a maternal health research center in Pennsylvania told Dr Meghan Lane-Fall that the cuts may lead her to leave academia altogether.
To address this crisis, the NIH in 2023 launched a seven-year, $168m initiative to set up more than a dozen research centers to investigate and improve maternal health outcomes, as well as help train new maternal health researchers.
Several of the institutions that host the maternal health centers – which tend to focus on improving maternal mortality among people of color and rural communities – are set to lose millions over the NIH cuts.
Late last week, the Trump administration declared that the National Institutes of Health (NIH) would only reimburse 15% of researchers’ “indirect costs”, which can pay for expenses such as staff and laboratory maintenance.
