What The Hell America!

Trump’s “big beautiful” budget bill accelerates a women’s health crisis decades in the making.

The turmoil resulting from the Trump administration threatens to make healthcare even more inaccessible and unaffordable for tens of millions of Americans … but it especially threatens women’s healthcare.

For the past few decades, women’s healthcare has been under increasing attack across the country. Even states like New York, often perceived as a beacon of women’s healthcare, are backsliding, increasingly unable to address women’s health challenges adequately. Indeed, the lack of funding and legislative support isn’t limited to rural areas or red states; it is everywhere.

The New York City public health nonprofit I lead, Public Health Solutions, had to close two sexual and reproductive health centers in Brooklyn earlier this year because of a lack of funding. This wasn’t because of the election. In truth, this would have begun to happen regardless of who was president. Women’s healthcare has been long neglected as a U.S. priority, to the detriment of the entire country.

As Trump’s government threatens to accelerate this decline even further, we must come to terms with how little our cities, states and federal government have valued and prioritized women’s health for more than 30 years and begin fighting back against this renewed assault.

The Problem We Face

Investing in women’s healthcare used to be a common sense, bipartisan cause. Richard Nixon, a Republican president, oversaw the passage of crucial women’s health legislation, including Title X.

But now, that bipartisan consensus has been shattered.

This is, in part, due to women’s health being used euphemistically to talk about “hot-button” health issues like abortion. While reproductive care is undoubtedly important, women’s health encompasses far more than that: cardiovascular disease; breast, cervical and ovarian cancer; mental illnesses; bone health; menopause; sexually transmitted infections (STIs) like HPV; and more.

These are all health issues that women often disproportionately face and that care facilities don’t receive the funding to properly address.

Healthcare spending has more than doubled in the last 20 years—from $2 trillion in 2005, to a projected $4.9 trillion in 2025—but spending for women’s health has declined immensely.

The federal funding for the Title X Family Planning program was $286 million in 2005, and in 2025, it was proposed to be still at the same level. However, it is expected to be completely eliminated under Trump’s proposal.

While food inflation has increased 68 percent since 2005, the value of Women, Infants and Children (WIC) benefits, a key program that provides health and nutrition benefits to pregnant and new mothers, has only risen 31 percent in that same period.

Women’s health-related research represented 13.5 percent of the NIH’s budget in 2005 and only 10.4 percent in 2025. And now we know that the Trump administration’s recently released budget framework also slashes the NIH budget by nearly 40 percent.

Healthcare spending has more than doubled in the last 20 years … spending for women’s health has declined immensely.

The status quo is unacceptable. The truth is that maintaining level funding is not enough. Every day that we aren’t increasing funding for women’s health is more funding lost, as a result of persistent inflation.

This disinvestment has been detrimental to the health of women and children, especially women and children of color. According to the New York State Department of Health, Black women in the state suffer five times as many deaths during childbirth than their white counterparts—in a state that is often heralded as a paragon of women’s and reproductive healthcare.

These problems were all too real before this administration, but Trump has sent the issue into overdrive with his calls to defund Medicaid, SNAP, Title X, Head Start, and other programs essential to women and their families. We are now in a full-blown women’s health crisis, and we cannot stand by idly any longer.

What We Must Do Now

We must fight for the resources that women and families need, not just accept the paltry investments they give us. Investment in women’s health is an investment in the future of this country. Mothers and children of all backgrounds and of every political affiliation need our support. 

Changing this trajectory will require mobilizing people across the country to act—to let their elected representatives know that these trends are unacceptable. They must demand a restored and expanded investment in women’s health, insisting that it is fundamental to the public’s health and well-being.

While Congress debates the specifics of President Trump’s proposal for a brutal, bare-bones budget, we must put pressure on our representatives and senators daily. We must call and tell them—in one clear, unified voice—that women’s health is family health, and that without more funding, women and families will suffer.

Ultimately, women’s health should not, and cannot, be a partisan issue; it is a common-sense issue.