Health experts: Axing CDC research on maternal health a ‘huge’ step backward – AJC.com
2025-04-23T15:50:06Z
Georgia once ranked worse than any other state for maternal mortality but has shown improvements by using both federal and state funds for the research and data collection.
But researchers told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution that the proposed budget does not include funding for either the national database currently seated at the CDC, called MMRIA, or funding for the public health workers in each state who investigate the deaths case-by-case to collect the data.
Credit: Ben Gray for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution Credit: Ben Gray for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution
If the cuts were to happen, states would once again be left to decide whether to fund the research on their own, how much to spend and what kinds of information to collect. Standardized data collection could erode, said Michael Kramer, director of The Center for Rural Health and Health Disparities at the Mercer University School of Medicine.
“This federal-state partnership has really dramatically improved our understanding of pregnancy-related death,” said Kramer, who has worked with CDC and state researchers on the data system.
“We would just be taking huge steps backward if we let that investment go. It would be a travesty for the quality of women’s health care and maternal health in the United States.”
Kramer spent a couple of years with other doctors, researchers and experts as a member of a Georgia committee that reviewed autopsy reports, medical files, police reports, and interviews with the deceased womens’ contacts. The committee then debated whether each death was related to the pregnancy. In their final reports, the committee determined that most deaths were preventable.
Georgia’s Department of Public Health and Gov. Brian Kemp have led the Legislature to enact more health coverage for new mothers. The state is piloting home health visits for low-income new mothers and their babies — and is continuing to strengthen the data collection from autopsies.
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Ky Lindberg, former CEO at the Healthy Mothers, Healthy Babies Coalition of Georgia, also served on Georgia’s review committee. Lindberg said she saw the data bloom into new ideas that made a difference.
Lindberg said it felt “euphoric” to help pass the 2022 law extending Medicaid coverage to low-income new mothers for the full year after childbirth.
“It was intoxicating,” she said.
About 141 new mothers died from pregnancy in Georgia from 2020 to 2022. But maternal mortality is a bellwether for larger problems, such as lack of general health access, Lindberg pointed out.
“How the heck will we know if our society is healthy if we remove data sets that are there to inform the work of not only policymakers but more importantly researchers, nonprofit organizations, and practitioners who rely on that information (for) the strategies they’re deploying?” Lindberg said.
A few states like Georgia started their own maternal mortality review committees more than a decade ago. The death certificate databases alone can be thin and unreliable. The CDC started beefing up another database and officially released MMRIA in 2017. As more states have joined the effort, MMRIA’s data has become increasingly robust, the researchers say.
The proposed budget has not been formally acknowledged or verified by the Trump administration but has circulated among federal health workers, including at the CDC. The Department of Health and Human Services did not respond to questions about it last week from The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. It was first reported by The Washington Post and the blog Inside Medicine, and has since been reported on by The Associated Press.
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The proposed budget says some federal health programs could be consolidated and moved; the CDC’s base budget could be cut by 44%.
Those cuts would build upon cuts that have already been made. Even if the CDC’s PRAMS infant mortality data set continues, the agency’s experts who built it have already been fired, the AJC reported.
Georgia state Rep. Sharon Cooper, a longtime advocate for maternal health measures in the Georgia Legislature, said she has bad memories about the wonky death certificate data that the study committee she chaired was presented when it took on maternal mortality in 2019.
The Marietta Republican says Georgia can manage without federal funds, and she is certain the state will find the money necessary to continue to work on maternal mortality.
“I believe that,” Cooper said.
Georgia Sen. Sonya Halpern, an Atlanta Democrat on the Senate Health Committee, agreed that the state sees maternal mortality as a priority.
“We recognize it’s important and we invest in it. But every state may not to the extent we do,” Halpern said. “We’d be missing the larger picture.”
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Halpern also concedes that Georgia may have a lot of federal cuts to weigh backfilling. “How much of a federal dollar loss can states actually absorb?”
About half the state’s public health budget is made up of federal funding, state officials have said. Kemp, for his part, isn’t taking a position yet.
Kemp spokesperson Garrison Douglas said proposed budgets “are always subject to change and lack certainty of implementation.”
AJC Staff Writer Morayo Ogunbayo contributed to this story.
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