The Trump administration launched a federal website on Mother's Day called Moms.gov, billed as a health resource for "new and expecting mothers." What it actually does, according to eleven US senators, is direct vulnerable pregnant women to unregulated, often non-medical anti-abortion facilities that have zero legal obligation to tell them the truth. Happy Mother's Day.
What Moms.gov Actually Is
The Department of Health and Human Services rolled out Moms.gov on May 11th with the kind of language that sounds warm and helpful until you read it twice. The site, HHS said, "supports expecting parents who are navigating difficult or unexpected pregnancies" and "features information about pregnancy centers, federally qualified health centers, nutritional guidance." Fine. Great. Except those "pregnancy centers" are crisis pregnancy centers, or CPCs, and CPCs are not what they sound like.
The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists is pretty clear about this. A CPC, ACOG states, is a facility that "represents itself as a legitimate reproductive healthcare clinic" while actually working to "dissuade people from accessing certain types of reproductive health care, including abortion care and even contraceptive options." They are not hospitals. They are not clinics in any meaningful regulated sense. And the people staffing them have no legal obligation to give pregnant patients accurate medical information.
There are somewhere between 2,400 and 2,800 of these facilities operating across the country, according to a Government Accountability Office report from earlier this year. Your federal government is now, with a cheery pastel website, sending pregnant women through their doors.
The Privacy Problem Nobody Is Talking About Enough
Here is a detail that should make you put your phone down for a second. Staff at CPCs are not subject to HIPAA. That is the federal law that requires actual medical providers to keep your health information private. The senators' letter, first reported by HuffPost, specifically flagged this point, saying the site "raises profound concerns about the health, safety and privacy of people who access this government website."
Think about who uses a site like Moms.gov. Someone who is scared, possibly in a state where abortion is already banned, possibly trying to figure out what her options even are. She clicks on a government website because she trusts it. The site sends her to a CPC. The CPC collects her personal health information. And then, legally, it can do essentially whatever it wants with that information. In a post-Dobbs world where abortion data has become a tool for prosecution in some states, this is not a small concern. It is a very large one.
Eleven Senators Have Had Enough
Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Chuck Schumer, Ron Wyden, Tammy Duckworth and six colleagues sent a letter to both Donald Trump and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on Wednesday demanding the site remove its CPC listings and "cease using federal resources to direct people to anti-abortion crisis pregnancy centers." They want answers about how the site was created, who made the decisions, and what exactly HHS thinks it is doing.
"Moms.gov is not about promoting women's health," the senators wrote. "It is an attempt to use HHS resources to further strip women of their rights and privacy." That is a fairly direct accusation to level at a sitting president and his health secretary. It is also, based on what the site actually does, a fairly accurate one.
This letter follows a separate push from dozens of House Democrats earlier this month, who sent their own letter to Kennedy raising the same concerns. So we now have both chambers of Congress, in writing, telling the administration that this website is a problem. The administration has not taken the site down. If you are surprised by this, welcome to the last several years of American governance.
The White House Response Was Exactly What You'd Expect
White House spokesperson Allison Schuster told the Guardian that "only Far-Left lunatics could take issue with expanding access to life-saving resources for expectant mothers." She described Moms.gov as a "comprehensive, one-stop shop for information on federal resources for maternal and infant health" and added that "nothing will stop the Trump Administration from Making America Healthy again, beginning with the critical step of creating brighter futures for all American children, born and unborn."
Born and unborn. There it is. That phrase is doing a lot of work in that statement. It is an acknowledgment, tucked into boilerplate, of exactly what critics say this website is for. Not maternal health. Not supporting women through difficult pregnancies with accurate medical information. Supporting pregnancies, full stop, regardless of what the pregnant person wants or needs or is facing. HHS did not respond to the Guardian's request for comment.
The Dobbs Context You Cannot Ignore
The senators' letter made a point of noting where all of this is happening. Since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, 21 states have banned or severely restricted abortion access, affecting tens of millions of people. The healthcare infrastructure that supported pregnant people in those states has been shredded. Real OB-GYN clinics have closed. Doctors have fled. People are driving hundreds of miles for care or going without it.
Into that vacuum, the federal government has now stepped with a website. Not a website connecting women to expanded Medicaid coverage, or to actual healthcare providers, or to emergency services, or to any of the concrete things a person facing a difficult pregnancy might genuinely need. A website that sends them to facilities that may lie to them about their options and keep records that are not protected by federal privacy law. This is what "making America healthy again" looks like in practice.
The Dingo Take
Look, the audacity here is almost impressive. The Trump administration launched a website called Moms.gov on Mother's Day, put maternal health language all over it, and used it to funnel scared pregnant women toward facilities that are legally permitted to mislead them. That is not a resource. That is a trap with nice fonts.
The White House response is the tell. Allison Schuster did not dispute the factual concerns about HIPAA, about CPC practices, about the lack of medical regulation. She called critics "Far-Left lunatics" and pivoted to talking points about unborn children. When you ask someone whether the food is safe and they call you crazy for asking, that is an answer. It is just not the one they meant to give.
Eleven senators sent a letter. Dozens of House members sent another one. HHS has not changed anything. That tracks perfectly with an administration that does not view pregnant women as the constituency this website is designed to serve. The constituency is the anti-abortion movement, and the website is working exactly as intended. The senators are not wrong to be alarmed. They are just probably not going to win this one through strongly worded letters.
