Yesterday I broke the news that the CDC has indefinitely shuttered the Pregnancy Risk Assessment Monitoring System (PRAMS), a comprehensive federal data collection program “designed to identify groups of women and infants at high risk for health problems, to monitor changes in health status, and to measure progress towards goals in improving the health of mothers and infants,” which has been in operation since 1988. CDC ordered a halt to collection of 2024 data effective January 31st of this year and put the entire 2025 program on indefinite hold.
This matches of course with the general HHS-wide crackdown on public health and research. But it still wasn’t clear precisely why the program had been shuttered or whether it might ever come back. Based on my sources, I can now report that the issue does not appear to be the various ways that comprehensive research on pregnancy might be perceived as bumping up against controversies over abortion and other politicized issues of reproductive health care. The issue is what the administration calls “DEI.” The questionnaires include questions about racism, discrimination, sexual orientation and identity, and an array of questions which look at how socioeconomic status can affect health. Some but not all of those question were new as of 2023 and basically all of them have to go.
