Federal Government’s New Website for Pregnant Women Promotes Antiabortion Pregnancy Centers

When better than Mother’s Day to launch a website that treats mothers as vessels? On May 10, the Department of Health and Human Services went live with a new website, moms.gov, that purports to provide support and resources to “mothers and fathers” with “difficult or unexpected pregnancies.” But make no mistake: The website is anti-abortion, anti-science propaganda that channels pregnant women and girls to unregulated pregnancy centers run by extremist religious organizations. These centers pressure women and girls to carry pregnancies to term through lies and deception, and without regard for their health or well-being.

Instead of supporting mothers, moms.gov is a weapon in the Trump administration’s war on women. Following the conservative Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 and its recent report on how federal policy can reestablish the patriarchal family, moms.gov pushes a vision in which women leave (or never enter) the workforce, stay in the home, have lots of babies, and depend on a male breadwinner. “Instead of investing in universal childcare, paid leave, and affordable healthcare, the Trump-Vance administration is spending taxpayer dollars on a pronatalist, anti-woman website littered with misinformation that could endanger women’s health and put children at risk,” says Emily Martin, chief program officer at National Women’s Law Center.

Calling pregnant women mothers before they give birth is the first clue to moms.gov’s anti-abortion agenda. Then, the website displays a photo of a headless, faceless torso — with arms cradling a massive belly — standing in a hayfield of tall yellow grass. The heavily pregnant white woman has long blond hair and is dressed in a yellow tulle dress with embroidered flowers. Animated baby footprints in pink and blue walk up each side of the photo as viewers scroll down the page. Evoking a pronatalist fantasy of white Christian motherhood, the image sums up the Trump administration’s Christian nationalist beliefs about who deserves support — and who deserves to reproduce.

Below this photo, moms.gov links two resources side by side: “pregnancy centers” and “federally qualified health centers.” The link to federally qualified health centers goes to a government database of licensed and regulated medical clinics funded by the federal government. The link to pregnancy centers, which are described as offering “limited medical services” at no charge, goes to the antiabortion movement website “Option Line” — a nationwide directory of unregulated pregnancy centers run by Heartbeat International, an evangelical organization with a global network of these centers that lure women and girls by pretending to offer unbiased information about abortion. Staffed by antiabortion activists often donning white lab coats but with no medical training, these centers falsely counsel women that abortion causes cancer, infertility, and mental illness.

Research has shown that 80% of pregnancy center websites contain false or misleading information. These centers collect women’s private medical information and share it with law enforcement as part of what critics call an abortion surveillance state. They lead women to believe they have healthy pregnancies when they in fact have ectopic pregnancies, resulting in life-threatening emergencies. They use expired sterilization solution to clean transvaginal ultrasounds. These unregulated pregnancy centers are run by volunteers who have not been subject to criminal background checks before doing ultrasounds and touch the bodies of minors without obtaining parental consent.

When states have attempted to regulate these unlicensed pregnancy centers, the $2.5 billion industry employs right-wing law firms to block these efforts, claiming that First Amendment free speech and religious exercise rights shield them from any transparency or accountability.

While channeling visitors directly to antiabortion pregnancy centers, moms.gov makes no mention of the many reproductive health clinics across the country that provide sliding-scale services to low-income people, including the 600 Planned Parenthood health centers providing comprehensive reproductive health care or the 750 brick-and-mortar abortion-providing clinics in the U.S. Nor does the website mention the federal Office of Population Affairs Clinic Locator — the government’s directory of comprehensive family planning clinics historically funded by Title X — a website that has so far escaped Trump administration censorship. Instead, Republicans are freezing Title X family planning funding and blocking Planned Parenthood from Medicaid reimbursements for services they provide to low-income people, forcing the closure of many Planned Parenthood health centers.

After linking to antiabortion pregnancy centers, moms.gov lists several of the Trump administration’s pet projects:

• nutrition guidelines for “pregnant women, new mothers, and infants” with Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s new inverted food pyramid encouraging people to eat more red meat and less whole grains;
• a link to enroll in “Trump accounts” — investment accounts for U.S. citizens under the age of 18, explicitly excluding children of immigrants, with a promise of “$1,000 from the U.S. Treasury” — launching July 4, 2026; and
• a link to TrumpRx — for drugs “to help couples build their families” by treating “ovulatory dysfunction, hormonal imbalances, insulin resistance, or excess weight” to “improve fertility outcomes.” The website purports to sell drugs at discount prices, but has in fact done little to make drugs more affordable.

The website also offers advice on “preconception health” and Fertility Awareness-Based Methods (FABMs) — evangelicals’ “natural” but unreliable alternative to contraception and IVF.

Moms.gov makes not a single reference to birth control, emergency contraception, or family planning, consistent with the anti-contraception agenda of the evangelical organizations that run the unregulated pregnancy centers promoted by the website.

The Trump administration has pointed to maternal mortality as justification for launching moms.gov, yet the site offers no resources addressing the dangers of pregnancy or childbirth. The United States has the highest maternal mortality rate among wealthy countries, with Black women dying at more than three times the rate of white women. In states banning abortion, maternal mortality rates are climbing, yet moms.gov provides a guide to federal conscience protections explaining how providers can turn pregnant women away from life-saving care on religious grounds. The website links to Centers for Disease Control resources on STIs and depression, but offers no mental health treatment resources and no postpartum support.

Moms.gov’s only mention of the workplace is a link to CDC resources on workplace hazards, but it offers no information on pregnant workers’ legal rights to accommodations. The website has no resources at all to support working parents, such as information on protections against pregnancy or caretaker discrimination, the right to paid (or even unpaid) family leave, childcare options, or health insurance for prenatal care or new babies — all supports that the Trump administration has blocked or eroded since taking office in January 2025.

Moms.gov was never about supporting mothers. It is about elevating a certain type of woman: white, Christian, married, stay-at-home, and pregnant — and erasing everyone else. “Moms.gov disregards evidence-based medicine, advances an anti-abortion agenda, fails to mention the rights that pregnant and parenting people have at work and at school, and misleads families about the impact of the administration’s economic policies,” says Martin. “If Donald Trump truly wanted to support moms and families, he would stop attacking the very programs that help people afford healthcare, childcare, housing, and groceries.”