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This week, we learned that the US EPA is planning to cancel funding for essential research into the environmental hazards that children, especially those in rural areas of our nation, face. What’s in the line of fire? Studies on how to protect children from PFAS ‘forever chemicals,’ wildfire smoke, pesticides, and other toxic chemicals that pose immediate and long-term health risks and that are most dangerous to the developing fetus and to infants and young children.

In response, Defend Our Health’s President and CEO, Emily Carey Perez de Alejo, stated: 

“This is happening at the same time that the White House has been floating proposals to persuade women to have more children, including “baby bonus” cash payments that would barely cover the average out-of-pocket cost of giving birth and educating women on their menstrual cycles to help them “catch the egg” for conception.

These policies, in combination, highlight a deeply harmful pro-birth but anti-health and anti-child agenda. If the Administration were genuinely interested in supporting families and people wishing to grow their families, they would be focused on reducing maternal mortality, expanding fertility and maternal health programs, improving the social safety net for parents and children (including ensuring that all children have access to safe food), and taking bold steps to reduce families’ exposures to toxic chemicals that are proven to reduce fertility, cause miscarriage and other pregnancy complications, and harm children’s development. 

Plastics-related chemicals are lowering fertility in people and pose serious risks to children; PFAS exposuresincrease the risk of gestational diabetes, preeclampsia, and fetal growth restriction during pregnancy and directly harm young children’s immune function and development. Exposure to pesticides, even at low doses, has been linked with cancers and neurobehavioral deficits in children and adverse pregnancy outcomes, including preterm births. We must take steps to study these toxic exposures and to rapidly move towards eliminating them; walking away from essential research and toxics regulations, as the Administration is doing, is wrong.”