Project 2025 Tracker / What’s done, what’s next

14. Department of Health and Human Services · Minor

Update CDC messaging on fertility awareness–based family planning

Not started

455 14. Department of Health and Human Services

“CDC should update its public messaging about the unsurpassed effectiveness of modern fertility awareness–based methods (FABMs) of family planning and stop publishing communications that conflate such methods with the long-eclipsed “rhythm” or “calendar” methods. CDC should fund studies exploring the evidence-based methods used in cutting-edge fertility awareness.”

What has happened

  1. Not started

    Nothing shows CDC updating its public messaging on fertility awareness-based methods or funding studies of them. The single Federal Register hit for "fertility awareness" in the window is an unrelated Treasury/HHS proposed rule on excepted fertility benefits (2026-05-13). Neither limb moved, and the negative is now about the page CDC actually publishes rather than about a 403. Read 2026-09-03: CDC's site index returns exactly **one** page site-wide for "fertility awareness", *Appendix F: Classifications for Fertility Awareness-Based Methods*, part of the 2024 U.S. Medical Eligibility Criteria and page-dated 2024-11-19 — before the window, so it fails the date gate and is recorded here as a read-but-undatable source. Its content is the clinical-eligibility table, and it does exactly what the Quote objects to: it treats "calendar-based methods" including "the calendar rhythm method" as one of the two families of FABM, side by side with symptoms-based methods. There is no effectiveness claim, no "unsurpassed effectiveness" language, no new public messaging, and no CDC-funded study of FABMs announced anywhere on the site.

    No action found yet. This entry is the starting point, not a finding.

Research log

What was searched, and what didn’t count as evidence

Research notes

  • The four p. 455 CDC asks (#1217, #1219, #1220, #1221) share one negative search. cdc.gov was once thought closed to us; it is not, and the pages were read on 2026-09-03. None of them can be Evidence: the two Abortion Surveillance pages carry the date 2024-11-27 and the one fertility-awareness page 2024-11-19, all before the evidence window, so they fail the date gate. They were read but carry no date inside the window, and the fact that they have not been revised since before 2025-01-20 is itself the shape of the negative — nothing was added to CDC’s abortion surveillance in the window, and nothing was removed either.
Action
other
Object
CDC public messaging on fertility awareness–based methods
ID
1219