For Brianna Henderson, birth control isn’t just about preventing pregnancy.
The Texas mother of two was diagnosed with a rare and potentially fatal heart condition after having her second child. In addition to avoiding another pregnancy that could be life-threatening, Henderson has to make sure the contraception she uses doesn’t jeopardize her health.
For more than a decade, a small team of people at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention worked to do just that, issuing national guidelines for clinicians on how to prescribe contraception safely for millions of women with underlying medical conditions — including heart disease, lupus, sickle cell disease, and obesity. But the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees the CDC, fired those workers as part of the Trump administration’s rapid downsizing of the federal workforce.
It also decimated the CDC’s larger Division of Reproductive Health, where the team was housed — a move that clinicians, advocacy groups, and fired workers say will endanger the health of women and their babies.
Clinicians said in interviews that counseling patients about birth control and prescribing it is relatively straightforward. But for women with conditions that put them at higher risk of serious health complications, special care is needed.
“We really were the only source of safety monitoring in this coun …