Lizy Wildsmith

Child care funding for the entire country is only $12.3 billion a year.

Donald Trump’s proposed budget would gut American science It would slash cancer research, drug trials, space exploration, and so much more.

Cutting $20 billion to NIH over 25 years may save $500 billion on paper, but it’d end up costing $8.2 trillion in lost human health.

But NIH isn't the only thing being cut. The budget also slashes all NSF-funded science by 73 percent. NASA faces “the biggest single-year cut to NASA in history."

Can confirm: Just spoke to him, and Barber and two others were, in fact, arrested.

Story coming.

Our Health ROI Explore how your tax dollars fund life‑saving medical research.

Ever wonder how many lives have been saved by NIH-funded research - including your own? Enter any medical condition and instantly see how your tax dollars transformed science into survival.

www.ourhealthroi.com

Is Kilmar Abrego Garcia alive? Because the amount of resistance to addressing his being trafficked gives the distinct impression that either he is dead or what they have done to him is so unspeakable that they cannot afford for him to be freed, seen, or spoken with.

Women, minorities fired in purge of NIH science review boards Scientists, with expertise in fields that include mental health, cancer and infectious disease, typically serve five-year terms and were not given a reason for their dismissal.

Segregated Science is Mediocre Science

But the Trump Admin is moving to make it as mediocre as possible -- "Six percent of White males who serve on [nih review] boards were fired, compared with half of Black and Hispanic females and a quarter of all females,"

www.washingtonpost.com/science/2025...

“Terrible things are happening outside. Poor helpless people are being dragged out of their homes. Families are torn apart. Men, women, and children are separated. Children come home from school to find that their parents have disappeared.”

Diary of Anne Frank
January 13, 1943

More older women becoming first-time moms amid U.S. fertility rate declines For the first time in 2023, there were more births among women 40 and older than there were to teenage girls, according to a government report.

What's causing more women to become first-time mothers later in life? @lizywild.bsky.social says a variety of "...conditions shape when people want to start having children." She also noted that when “women are able to control their fertility,” other opportunities become easier to access. Read more:

The Griffin List A list of 60,273 North Carolina voters – these are registered voters who showed ID to early vote in the November 2024 election – whose votes Jefferson Griffin wants to not be counted. ...

🚨 Hey, North Carolina!

Please search this list to see if you - or others you know - have been singled out by Jefferson Griffin.

If you're one of the 60,000+ voters on this list, please TAKE ACTION. Call your county BOE ASAP! Then tell Griffin to shove it! #RiggsWon

thegriffinlist.com#search-line

URGENT: MAGA Trying to Steal Supreme Court Seat in NC The MAGA attack on 65,000 votes — and the judge fighting back.

Justice Riggs won her election for the NC Supreme Court.

Republicans are trying to steal it.

The problem is: they've mistaken correlation for causation. They think their parents and grandparents had a good life *because* of manufacturing jobs. When, in reality, their parents and grandparents had a good life *despite* manufacturing jobs, because of unions, high taxes, and social policies.

Grieving husband says "reckless" Texas abortion law led to pregnant wife's death Between 2019 and 2022, the maternal mortality rate in Texas increased 56% after the state outlawed abortions.

Porsha Ngumezi was killed by Texas’ abortion ban after doctors refused her a D&C to treat the miscarriage she suffered at 11 weeks gestation. She leaves behind a husband and two sons. www.cbsnews.com/news/grievin...

This is what the GOP's SAVE Act would do at the federal level. Adding layers of complexity to voter ID requirements that would strategically disenfranchise women and others who've changed their names.

Pi (pie) day was always one of the biggest nerdy events at @childtrends.bsky.social when we were in person together. This year, the sadness of us not being together is met with also realizing we had to do our first layoff ever last week. Help us keep our mission alive: www.childtrends.org/donate

NIH to terminate or limit grants related to vaccine hesitancy and uptake The order covers more than 40 awards to researchers around the country seeking to understand why vaccine acceptance has declined.

NIH to terminate or limit grants related to vaccine hesitancy and uptake www.washingtonpost.com/health/2025/...

Attending in Raleigh!

Texas Banned Abortion. Then Sepsis Rates Soared. ProPublica’s first-of-its-kind analysis is the most detailed look yet into a rise in life-threatening complications for women experiencing pregnancy loss under Texas’ abortion ban.

Pregnancy became far more dangerous in Texas after the state banned abortion in 2021, ProPublica found in a first-of-its-kind data analysis.

The rate of sepsis shot up more than 50% for women hospitalized when they lost their pregnancies in the second trimester.

Another way to put this:

Musk and his twerps have exposed us to pandemics, broken science, stolen all your data, endangered the U.S. payments system, threatened air traffic control, and cut off HIV medication to 20m people in order to save ::checks notes:: 2/10th of a percent of the federal budget.

Our two papers on abortion bans and fertility/infant mortality are now out.

In 14 states w/ abortion bans, fertility increased 1.7% and infant mortality increased 6%.

Key takeaway is that these impacts were disproportionately felt among those w/ greatest structural disadvantages.

Links below.

Agreed, this is an excellent overview of family change in rural and urban communities

The ordinarily cautious and conservative ABA is blowing the whistle: The break-the-glass moment has arrived.
www.americanbar.org/news/abanews...

Just had my contract cancelled

stone text inlay: HERE WE ADMIT A WRONG

I went to post about the National Japanese American Memorial in D.C., which is beautiful but usually missed by tourists. It is a deeply staggering admission of guilt and a warning to future Americans. I went to link to the inscriptions and-

Well, they took the site down. www.nps.gov/places/japan...

1/ Jessica Walter is an incredibly thoughtful sociologist. For my social media friends feeling overwhelmed lately, grab a glass of wine and read her take on how to deal with this chaos. At the very least, the wine should help! 🍷🤣 #Sociology #Overwhelm

1/6

In This Brave New World, Does Scholarship Still Matter? If the recent past is no longer a useful guide to seeking change in the present, what good is policy-adjacent scholarship?

Thanks to @lpeblog.bsky.social for the invitation to write about what policy scholars should do if "policy" is permanently broken. There are lots of good answers, but we can't afford to ignore the question.

Congratulations!

NIH is the largest single funder of cancer research in the world. This is already a disaster and we’re on day two.

All NIH study sections canceled indefinitely. This will halt science and devastate research budgets in universities.

How would the loss of mifepristone affect reproductive health care? Loss of FDA approval for mifepristone would result in decreased access to safe abortion care. It will also prevent patients with certain types of

Loss of FDA approval for #mifepristone would result in decreased access to safe abortion care. It will also prevent patients with certain types of miscarriage from receiving one of the standard treatment options.
thosenerdygirls.org/mifepristone...