Editor’s Note: This article was originally published by the College Fix on March 12, 2025. With edits to match MTC’s style guidelines, it is cross-posted here with permission.
A Planned Parenthood executive is researching “power and oppression” and “reproductive health services” with the help of nearly half a million in taxpayer funds.
The study, “Enhancing Policy Impact for Reproductive Health Equity,” will look at “societal dynamics of power and oppression” can affect access to sexual and reproductive health services. The study runs through Aug. 2026.
These “societal dynamics” disproportionately harm “individuals who identify as Black, Indigenous, and people of color … those with disabilities and chronic disease, individuals who are transgender or gender-nonconforming…and people of lower socioeconomic status,” according to study author Elizabeth Janiak.
Janiak is a Harvard University professor whose research “explores how government and institutional policies create inequities in access to and quality of sexual and reproductive health…care,” according to her faculty bio. Janiak also serves as director of social science research at the Planned Parenthood League of Massachusetts.
She also runs the “Lab for Contraception and Abortion Research” at Brigham and Women’s Hospital.
The study, which uses an “intersectional framework,” is designed to “understand barriers to insurance utilization, with the goal of improving future health policy interventions.”
The project received $495,307 from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development split between $327,394 in direct costs and $167,913 in indirect costs.
The College Fix contacted the National Institutes of Health, the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, and program official Ronna Popkin with questions about whether the project’s future has been affected by the Trump administration, a more specific summary of its costs, and if the NIH regularly funds research that uses an “intersectional framework.”
The Fix sent two emails and left voicemails but received no responses in the past several weeks.
The Fix twice contacted Janiak and the United States Department of Health and Human Services via email with the same questions but received no response.
A medical doctor criticized the research design, particularly its high indirect costs. President Donald Trump recently said indirect costs should be capped at 15 percent for NIH grants.
Dr. Kurt Miceli with Do No Harm told the Fix, “Indirect costs of $167,913 represent an overhead of approximately 34%. This is well in excess of the Trump Administration’s recent standard indirect cost rate on all grants of 15%.”
He also criticized the use of taxpayer dollars to fund research “grounded in an intersectional framework,” saying “this is really a matter of priority.”
“Resources are not unlimited, particularly in an age of budget deficits,” Dr. Miceli said. “The NIH with its taxpayer dollars should focus on funding basic biomedical research that will improve the health of all people rather than funding research grounded in a political ideology.”
The study’s description says an “exacerbating factor for these health inequities is the social stigmatization of sexuality, which compels individuals to keep their utilization of [sexual and reproductive health] services private for fear of negative repercussions, particularly for people who hold minoritized identities.”
The project specifically studies the effects of Massachusetts’s Protecting Access To Confidential Healthcare law, which allows individuals to have health insurance companies “send forms about the services you’ve gotten to an address different from your parent’s or spouse’s, or to a private online link.”
The research “will estimate the proportion of insured dependents who refrain from using their insurance for sensitive services even in the setting of legal protections, quantitatively assess population knowledge of the PATCH law, and qualitatively assess barriers to use of the law’s protections among different demographic subgroups.”
The Trump administration has made sweeping changes at the NIH in the past two months, such as attempting to cut federal grant funding for various ideological research projects. Jay Bhattacharya, Trump’s nominee to lead NIH, has vowed to “establish a culture of respect for free speech in science and scientific dissent at the agency.”
The College Fix has previously reported on other National Institutes of Health projects focused on identity politics, including a study of the effects of “microaggressions” on “pansexual” youth and another to look at the effects of “microaggressions” on “black women living with HIV.”
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Image: Planned Parenthood in Baton Rouge, Louisiana by Paul Lowry on Flickr
Brigham & Women’s Hospital is a combination of four major Boston hospitals: Peter Bent Brigham Hospital, Robert Breck Brigham Hospital, the Boston Lying-In Hospital (which specialized in childbirth) and the Free Hospital for Women. It then merged with Massachusetts General Hospital to form Mass General Brigham, which is both a teaching hospital (system) affiliated with Harvard Medical School *and* the largest provider of healthcare in Massachusetts (and, increasingly, Southern New Hampshire). It also includes the Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary, perhaps the best place for eye surgery in the world.
In 2023, average per-capita health care costs in Massachusetts surged to $11,153, an unsustainable 8.6% leap from 2022, and more than double the targeted 3.6% rate. Mass General Brigham is a non-profit, which doesn’t mean that they aren’t making an awful lot of money and we simply can’t afford things like a “Lab for Contraception and Abortion Research.”
Even if Harvard is paying for it — and I’d love to see an audit that indicates what Harvard is actually paying for and what is passed on to our medical bills — it still becomes a cost for MD training and hence their salary needs that we then pay through our medical bills.
But the larger issue is that the Planned Parenthood League of Massachusetts is, theoretically, separate from all of this and hence her being involved in both raises lots of ethical questions.
$11,153 a person — we can’t afford this, and a half million dollars to see if girls knowing that their parents won’t know they had an abortion will encourage more of them to have one — heck, let’s just say it will and call it done. And spend the half million on trying to cure cancer instead…