Author: Allison Carmen

Allison Carmen is the CFO, general counsel and chief business operator at the Motherhood Center of New York, a leading women-run healthcare organization focused on treating postpartum depression and anxiety. She is also a contributor to publications such as The Daily Beast, Salon and Psychology Today, where she writes about women’s well-being — including healthcare access, maternal mental health, and the economic and social issues that uniquely affect women.

IVF Promises, Healthcare Cuts: The New Reproductive Hypocrisy

In today’s political landscape, fertility has become a brand—plastered across speeches and press releases as a symbol of family values and new life. But behind the fanfare (and empty promises) of IVF expansion lies a much darker truth: Healthcare systems are collapsing, maternity wards are closing, and protections against toxic chemicals are being rolled back. The result is a reproductive paradox in which women are pushed to give birth in environments that are increasingly hostile to their survival.

This is not a coherent pro-family agenda. It is chaos disguised as care—fertility promoted when politically useful, maternal health ignored when inconvenient, and science dismissed when it interferes with corporate interests. Families are promised new beginnings, but stripped of the very resources needed to support them.

Until mothers and children are placed at the center of policy—not as props but as the purpose—the reproductive hypocrisy will persist.

You Must Have Your Baby, But Sorry, You Have No Insurance

Medicaid is a cornerstone of maternal healthcare, providing coverage for nearly two-thirds of women of reproductive age and financing 42 percent of all births in the United States, according to an analysis by KFF. That means almost half of all new parents—disproportionately low-income—depend on it for prenatal care, safe delivery and postpartum support.

Unfortunately, pregnant and postpartum people are at the center of the crisis created by the One Big Beautiful Bill—recently passed by both the House and Senate and signed into law by Donald Trump—which guts Medicaid by nearly $1 trillion over the next decade.

If clinics are shuttered, hospitals are closed and providers are stripped from Medicaid, what happens to people forced to carry pregnancies without care? They will face unmanaged labor, untreated postpartum depression, and dangerous complications alone.

In a nation that mandates childbirth but slashes access to care, the question isn’t whether outcomes will worsen. It’s how many will suffer—and how many won’t survive.