The Trump administration abruptly pulled funding last week for a research grant meant to protect pregnant women from domestic violence because it was categorized as a “DEI” study.
The National Institute of Health grant funded a two-year project to create a training program for early career clinicians to measure intimate partner violence and pregnancy. The leading cause of death among pregnant and postpartum women in the U.S. is homicide by an abusive partner. Perinatal women are more than twice as likely to be murdered than to die from sepsis, hypertensive disorders or hemorrhage.
The grant was awarded last September after hundreds of hours of work from researchers, scientists and other staff, including some NIH grant officers, three of the four lead researchers told HuffPost. The goal was to create a three-day hybrid training program for OB-GYNs, public health researchers and other clinicians across the country to help spot and measure the correlation between domestic violence and pregnancy.
President Donald Trump has pledged to protect women, and yet research that could go on to save the lives of thousands of pregnant women and mothers has been unceremoniously cut. The move is particularly confounding given that Trump’s conservative Supreme Court repealed federal abortion protections, leading to nearly 20 states enacting abortion bans and forcing more people to stay pregnant.
With more pregnant women in the U.S. and maternal mortality rates on the rise, this research is arguably more important than ever. But it was caught up in the Trump administration’s broader campaign to slash all federal initiatives for diversity, equity and inclusion.
The four lead researchers were gutted when they found out last week that NIH canceled their funding because the project “no longer effectuates agency priorities,” insinuating the research included “amorphous equity objectives.”
“So called diversity, equity, and inclusion (‘DEI’) studies are often used to support unlawful discrimination on the basis of race and other protected characteristics, which harms the health of Americans. Therefore, it is the policy of NIH not to prioritize such research programs,” according to the termination letter from NIH’s Office of Extramural Research, reviewed by HuffPost.
NIH immediately terminated the grant – instead of the standard protocol to temporarily suspend it – because “no modification of the project could align the project with agency priorities.” NIH, OER, and the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees NIH, did not immediately respond to HuffPost’s request for comment.
“The logistics is they have a list of 100 naughty words that include ‘women’ and ‘female inequity,’ and I think whoever was wielding ‘control F’ that day noticed that our grant had ‘equity’ in the title,” Rebecca Fielding-Miller, a principal investigator of the research and associate professor at the University of California San Diego, told HuffPost. (She was not speaking on behalf of UCSD.)
Integral to the grant project was a mentoring program to help jumpstart the careers of “underrepresented early-stage investigators.” This would ensure the continuation of critical but often underfunded research on domestic violence and pregnancy.
“The people who do research on violence in sexual and gender minority communities, violence against women, violence in black and brown communities ― they are significantly more likely to be from those communities,” Fielding-Miller said.
“When they are systematically targeting research that focuses on these communities, what they’re also doing is systematically targeting investigators from these communities.”
Trump, along with billionaire Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency, has waged a war against supposed-DEI issues under the guise of slashing government spending. However, the administration has defined DEI so broadly that it has jeopardized teacher training programs, climate-friendly tree-planting programs, family planning services, and more.
NIH announced in February that the department would cap indirect costs for grants at 15% as part of DOGE’s larger government spending objective. But the domestic violence and pregnancy grant had an 8% indirect cost ― “an incredibly cheap grant, even by their [NIH’S] own standards,” Fielding-Miller said.
“It just strikes me as ironic that this was canceled in the name of efficiency, when really I don’t know how they expect people to write science that is more efficient than this,” Nicholas Metheny, a co-investigator of the research, told HuffPost.
Sarah Peitzmeier, the third researcher who spoke with HuffPost, pointed out that domestic violence during pregnancy is linked to often larger, more costly infant and maternal health issues.
“We know intimate partner violence during pregnancy is linked to miscarriage, hemorrhage, placental disruption and postpartum depression. It’s also linked to negative infant outcomes, preterm birth, low birth weight,” Peitzmeier said. “These are really non-partisan issues that everyone should care about.”
“And these are expensive issues, too,” Metheny added. “These are things that cost the American taxpayer millions and millions and millions of dollars a year. By going to the source and the root problem, which sometimes is IPV [intimate partner violence], then this is one way to actually decrease unnecessary health care costs and improve the health of pregnant people.”
An estimated 324,000 pregnant people are abused each year by an intimate partner, and that number is likely to increase as more people stay pregnant after the fall of Roe v. Wade. Since the landmark Supreme Court decision, calls to the National Domestic Violence Hotline about reproductive coercion ― a form of intimate partner violence specific to pregnancy and reproductive health ― have doubled across the country.
Researchers in a 2024 study found that there’s “a dire need for universal screening and interventions,” after concluding that pregnant women are more likely to be murdered by an abusive partner if they live in a state where abortion is restricted.
“They’re systematically removing women, women of color, people of color, sexual and gender minorities from the pool of researchers. And what the end point of that is is an academy that is systematically more white, more male, more cisgender, more heterosexual, more wealthy,” Fielding-Miller said.
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“It will be an ongoing feedback loop of what those folks think is important research, and that means less research about intimate partner violence, less research about health disparities,” she added. “So even after the immediate shocks of this are done, the ripple effects are going to live on for decades.”
Need help? In the U.S., call 1-800-799-SAFE (7233) for the National Domestic Violence Hotline. In the U.S., call 1-866-331-9474 or text “loveis” to 22522 for the National Dating Abuse Helpline.
