The White House Made Mothers a Website. The South Is Burying Them.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. wants us to know the administration cares about mothers. He has a website to prove it.
On Mother’s Day, the Department of Health and Human Services rolled out Moms.gov, a federal landing page promising resources for expecting parents who face “difficult or unexpected pregnancies.” There are tabs for breastfeeding tips, nutrition facts, and Trump Accounts. There is a glossy tagline. There is even a press release, reported by The Hill, in which Deputy Assistant Secretary for Women’s Health Dr. Dorothy Fink claimed the agency’s Perinatal Improvement Collaborative has cut maternal mortality by 41.5 percent.
What there isn’t, of course, is a hospital.
That distinction matters, because while Washington was busy stocking a website with PDFs, the country it claims to serve is in the middle of a maternal health emergency that disproportionately punishes women in the very states that voted hardest for the administration handing out the URL.
According to The Commonwealth Fund’s October 2025 international comparison, Louisiana posted a maternal mortality rate of 41.9 deaths per 100,000 live births in 2023, more than four times California’s rate of 9.5. CDC data aggregated for 2019 through 2023 by America’s Health Rankings shows Tennessee at 42.1, Louisiana at 40.7, Mississippi at 39.7, Alabama at 35.1, and Texas at 29.3. Texas, notably, is the only state that doesn’t partner with the CDC’s federal maternal mortality program, per USAFacts. And per the CDC, Black women die from childbirth at more than three times the rate of white women.
And we are not bleeding because we lack a website. We are bleeding because we lack obstetricians. A University of Minnesota study reported by Stateline in July 2025 found that 60 percent of hospitals in Louisiana and Mississippi no longer offer obstetric services. The Center for Healthcare Quality and Payment Reform reported in November that 116 rural labor and delivery units have closed since the end of 2020, with another 27 closures completed or planned in 2025, leaving only 41 percent of rural hospitals delivering babies. Their analysis also found rural patients can spend 50 minutes or more reaching a hospital with maternity services.
The cruelty of the timing is hard to miss. The same administration that cut the ribbon on Moms.gov signed the so-called One Big Beautiful Bill Act last summer. According to the National Health Law Program, it slashes roughly $990 billion from Medicaid over the next decade, and the Congressional Budget Office estimates 10 million more people will be uninsured by 2034. That matters because Medicaid pays for about 41 percent of all births and nearly half of rural births, per KFF. In Texas alone, The Commonwealth Fund found, Medicaid covered 185,348 births in 2023. Stack new work requirements set to take effect in January 2027 on top of the quiet gutting of CDC maternal mortality review staff documented by The Century Foundation, and the math gets bleak fast.
Abortion bans make it worse. Research published this fall in the journal Pregnancy found maternal mortality rates in states with total abortion bans have stayed consistently higher than in states where abortion remains legal, with the gap widening in Texas and Louisiana since the Dobbs ruling. Doctors there describe waiting for fetal heart tones to stop before treating sepsis. That is not a website problem. That is a policy problem.
So yes, we now have Moms.gov. We can click around between cheerful illustrations and tips on prenatal vitamins. But a URL does not staff a delivery room. It does not reopen a shuttered rural hospital. It does not restore a Medicaid card or train an OB willing to practice in a state where she might be prosecuted.
If we want to make motherhood safer, the answer is not branding. It is investment, access, and honesty about who is dying and why. Until then, Moms.gov is just a very expensive bumper sticker. Go beyond the headlines…
Poll: What Americans mean when they say they’re worried about a stolen election
A humanoid robot becomes Buddhist monk in South Korea ahead of Buddha’s birthday
Trump administration launches Moms.gov on Mother’s Day
Suburban poverty traps America’s senior citizens
The psychological traits that build an extremist personality
Rewiring the urge to smoke: How targeted brain stimulation may help people to quit
Choice of Tea or Coffee Could Affect Risk of Osteoporosis in Older Women
wildr: a new free app to guide us on our ecological journey
