July 23, 2026
Tonight: the federal teen-pregnancy plan that skips birth control, a coverage cliff for new mothers, and more.
— Meghan McCarthy
THE BIRTH-CONTROL CLUE HIDING IN SEMAGLUTIDE PRESCRIPTIONS?
Women who used hormonal contraception were more likely to later start a semaglutide, the drug behind Ozempic and Wegovy, than women who didn't, according to a study comparing nearly 23,000 first-time semaglutide users with matched controls. The association was strongest among women who had used multiple contraceptive types. The researchers stress this is an association, not proof that birth control causes weight gain, but say contraceptive history may help identify women more likely to seek pharmacologic weight management.
COVERAGE FOR NEW MOTHERS CLIMBED, THEN HIT A WALL
Forty-six states and DC now guarantee a full year of Medicaid coverage after pregnancy, up from almost none four years ago. But a Georgetown and Urban Institute analysis found progress has stalled. Expiring enhanced marketplace subsidies and new limits on how states finance Medicaid are expected to push coverage back down, and more than 100,000 pregnant and postpartum women are enrolled through pathways now at risk. Roughly a third of pregnancy-related deaths happen after the first postpartum week, when losing coverage means losing follow-up care.
THREE MATERNITY WARDS CLOSED IN THREE WEEKS
Over the span of three weeks, hospitals in Kentucky, Indiana, and Iowa moved to shut or shrink labor-and-delivery services, according to Becker’s Hospital Review, on top of 29 maternity closures last year. Financial losses, staffing shortages, and falling birth rates keep driving the math, pushing rural patients hours from the nearest delivery room. A few systems are going the other way: AdventHealth just restored obstetric care to a rural Kansas hospital that had gone without.
THE MENOPAUSE MARKET BOOM AND MISDIAGNOSES
Menopause is a booming market, yet only 1.7% of American women over 40 were on hormone therapy in 2023, and the country has a little over 5,000 menopause-certified clinicians for the 1.3 million women who reach menopause each year, Bloomberg Businessweek reported. Into that gap came telehealth start-ups and supplement brands. When a reporter ran her own symptoms through four of them, two diagnosed perimenopause off an intake form and prescribed hormones she didn't need, blaming weight gain and night sweats that actually traced to stress-baking and too many blankets. As one OB-GYN asked, have women gone "from being dismissed and ignored to being preyed upon?"
THE FEDERAL TEEN-PREGNANCY PLAN THAT DISCOURAGES BIRTH CONTROL
The Trump administration is redirecting federal teen-pregnancy-prevention money toward groups that teach "fertility awareness", i.e. tracking cervical mucus and body temperature, while steering teens away from contraception, according to reporting from Stateline. The language could, of course, route funds to anti-abortion pregnancy centers. Congress created the program in 2010 and has renewed it on a bipartisan basis for 16 years, including in the 2026 budget, even as decades of research tie abstinence-focused sex ed to higher teen birth rates, not lower.