The US Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF) recently released a Recommendation Statement examining the data to support screening for iron deficiency anemia in pregnancy and finding them lacking. 1 It also found insufficient evidence to make a clear recommendation for or against preventive iron supplementation in pregnancy, 2,3 which has been a routine practice for decades, with up to 77% to 89% of patients reporting supplement use. 4 As highlighted previously by the USPSTF and others, there is an urgent need for studies and clinical trials to support evidence-based medicine in the obstetric population, and this can only be accomplished by ceasing paternalistic approaches that have led to the exclusion of pregnant patients in research. [5][6][7][8][9][10][11] All of this remains true, and there is still so very far to go.In the updated USPSTF review, an additional 5 randomized clinical trials (RCTs) were included with the 12 RCTs carried forward from the 2015 review. The USPSTF determined that the availability of good-and fair-quality RCTs was sufficient; observational studies were included only for the association questions. However, it is important to acknowledge that while RCTs provide rigor and purity for evaluating medical interventions, they may not always be the best study design for all clinical questions. Indeed, the many traditional RCT designs and implementation approaches limit real-world applicability, discourage involvement and thus applicability to marginalized and underserved populations, and decrease the likelihood that the effect on rare outcomes such as severe maternal morbidity will be detected. Large, populationbased studies provide additional useful evidence when examining uncommon outcomes with a high impact such as severe maternal morbidity and mortality, transfusion, and death. An RCT examining such rare outcomes may be costprohibitive and thus an ineffective method to approach several aspects of the question at hand.Importantly, it is vital to ensure that the outcomes assessed in studies are physiologically plausible. Some of the outcomes reviewed by the USPSTF, such as gestational diabetes, hypertensive disorders, and cesarean delivery, have been associated with iron deficiency anemia in observational studies but not in RCTs. It is more likely that the association in observational studies was due to confounders such as nutritional status, body mass index, healthy lifestyle choices, socioeconomic status, and systemic racism rather than iron defi-