Today, the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) rescinded its 2009 endangerment finding: a drastic move even in the context of the Trump administration’s larger deregulatory and anti-climate agenda. Impacts on climate action and communities threaten to be extremely broad but also pose particular threats to increasingly beleaguered reproductive rights.
Because it is a vital legal tool for regulating climate-warning pollutants, both health and environmental organizations have fiercely challenged this rollback of the endangerment finding. Some protesting groups cited community experience and scientific and medical evidence pointing to pollutants’ harmful impact on health as well as the urgent need for regulation to combat climate warming: the cause of increasingly severe hurricanes, wildfires, and heat.
Less regulation of vehicle and power plants emissions, for example, will mean worse air quality, which not only harms human health, in general, but also has specific detrimental impacts on pregnancy health. The National Climate Assessment, which was released by the US government in November of 2023, explained that extreme heat exposure is associated with adverse birth outcomes and noted other threats to pregnancy health, such as wildfire smoke. These studies showed that women of reproductive age “disproportionately experience a (climate change) burden,” according to the report. Because women of color more often belong to underserved communities they were especially at risk, the authors noted.
National Climate Assessments are congressionally mandated. But that did not stop the Trump administration from pulling the 2023 report off government websites and firing the contributors working on the next one as well as another report that found a higher risk of climate harms for communities of color.
Other more overt, more dramatic attacks on women’s health since Trump retook office have garnered more attention than slower environmental violence. But undermining the experiences of communities hit hard by climate disaster, science and practices, policies and rules—established by decades of fierce struggle to protect environmental health and equity for all—is just another, quieter way that this administration continues to dismantle women’s rights.
