Until women’s health is everywhere, women’s health is nowhere (6 June 2025)

Summary

In the US, women die at a greater rate in pregnancy and during the postpartum period than in any other high-income country, and this rate has been increasing. Even if some of the apparent increase is attributable to changes in reporting, the fact remains that in the US, mortality rates are rising rather than falling, while disparities are widening.1Yet despite recent efforts to prioritise women’s health research, pregnancy research remains woefully underfunded. Much of the existing funding for pregnancy research focuses not on the health of pregnant individuals themselves; rather, they are considered hosts whose social, intrinsic biological, and environmental determinants affect fetal and child development: an important perspective, but not the only one.

A recent report by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine noted that National Institutes of Health (NIH) spending on women’s health research in the past decade has averaged only 8.8% of its total budget, of which only a fraction went to study pregnancy. Despite progress in the form of new initiatives—such as the NIH Implementing a Maternal Health and Pregnancy Outcomes Vision for Everyone (IMPROVE) Initiative—funding for research regarding preconception, pregnant, and postpartum individuals remains a small proportion of the NIH portfolio.