Brian Lear on WNYC, now to our Health and Climate Tuesdays section of the show, today on

the health side, and as we've been doing since the beginning of the year,

focusing very much on health and climate stories related to changes that are taking

place under the Trump administration. So a recent expert panel organized by the Food and Drug

Administration cast doubt on the safety of antidepressant medications used during pregnancy,

specifically the SSRIs, as they're known, Selexo, Lexa, Prozolof, Prozac, Paxil,

so many of those are SSRIs, which stands for selective serotonin re-uptake inhibitors.

And no, I didn't memorize that.

I read it off a page.

The drugs are largely considered safe for pregnant people among health care providers.

And the panel itself sparked backlash from several medical organizations,

including the American College of

obstetricians and gynecologists and what they call the national curriculum for reproductive

psychiatry. While one in five pregnant women and new parents in this country suffer from anxiety

and depression, roughly six to eight% of pregnant women are prescribed SSRIs. So that's the rough

percentage of people taking them when they're pregnant. So the FDA is now weighing whether or not

to add to the warning labels on this class of medications, which may influence how patients and doctors

consider the use of SSRIs in pregnancy, you know, a warning label that's pregnancy-specific.

So let's talk about this. Our guest is the chair of one of those organizations that has spoken

out sarcastic, or not sarcastically, but skeptically,

and fact-checked the panel. It's Dr. Lauren Osborne, vice chair of clinical research at the

Department of OBGYN at Weil-C-Rnell Medicine and chair of the National Curriculum in Reproductive

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