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President Trump has promised to expand access to IVF and recently predicted that he will be known as the, quote, "fertilization president." But his administration has eliminated a team at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in charge of researching those fertility treatments. NPR's Sarah McCammon reports.
SARAH MCCAMMON, BYLINE: Among the thousands of federal health agency employees who lost their jobs in recent days was a small group responsible for collecting data and conducting research about the safety and effectiveness of in vitro fertilization at clinics around the country.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: We know that IVF is expensive and it's not accessible to everyone. And so our information provides data for patients to make informed decisions.
MCCAMMON: That's a former CDC employee with knowledge of the team's work. She asked us not to identify her for fear of professional repercussions for speaking out. In documents reviewed by NPR, the employees were notified last week that their positions were being eliminated as part of a larger reorganization at the Department of Health and Human Services.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: So I think patients will lose out on having the information they need to make choices that are good for their families.
MCCAMMON: According to that former CDC employee and another source with knowledge of the layoffs, the cuts affected a six-member team based in Atlanta that included experts in epidemiology, statistics and public health. Barbara Collura, president and CEO of RESOLVE, the National Infertility Association, says the CDC team was first created in response to a law passed by Congress in the early 1990s in an effort to promote transparency in the growing fertility industry.
BARBARA COLLURA: Congress wanted patients to know what they were getting when they went to an IVF clinic. Were the results what the clinic said they were? Well, let's look at the data on the CDC website and verify it.
MCCAMMON: Collura says over the years, that data has been used to spot problems and improve health outcomes for both mothers and babies. For example, she says the team's research helped the industry to recognize some of the risks associated with twins, triplets and even larger multiple births resulting from IVF, leading many providers to recommend patients avoid transferring multiple embryos at once. Sean Tipton of the American Society for Reproductive Medicine says at least some of the data will still be compiled. The industry has been collecting information from IVF clinics for decades. But Tipton says the CDC researchers were able to take that information much farther and present it in a way that both doctors and patients could use.
SEAN TIPTON: In order to really make use of it, you have to have people who understand both the medicine behind it and the epidemiology behind it in order to translate that data into meaningful changes that clinicians can bring to their patients.
MCCAMMON: Tipton says the impact of this recent round of cuts at HHS goes well beyond the team at CDC and could have far-reaching implications.
TIPTON: It certainly looks to me like if you had the misfortune of having women's or reproductive or sexual health anywhere in the name of your department or your title, you were particularly in danger from these cuts.
MCCAMMON: The dismantling of the CDC team could also run afoul of the federal law that led to its creation, says Senator Ron Wyden, a Democrat from Oregon who sponsored the 1992 legislation.
RON WYDEN: Collection of the data, under the law that I wrote, is congressionally mandated. And without staff, you're not going to be able to fulfill the mandate.
MCCAMMON: Wyden says he struggles to understand why the administration would make these cuts at a time when Trump says he wants to expand access to IVF.
WYDEN: For somebody to say that they want to be the fertilization president and then basically do everything they can to gut the office that was set up in order to do that essential work is absurd.
MCCAMMON: Officials with the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees the CDC, have not responded to repeated requests for comment. Sarah McCammon, NPR News.
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