Biden announces historic investment in women’s menopausal health

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President Joe Biden signed an executive order issuing historic investments in women’s health, including research on menopause and midlife health.

The president issued the order Monday morning at a White House Women’s History Month event. The event featured appearances by First Lady Jill Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris, and former First Lady of California Maria Shriver. The order allocates $12 billion for women’s health research and represents the “most comprehensive” executive action to improve women’s health research, the White House said.

However, this funding is not guaranteed. Given that Congress has the “power of the purse,” lawmakers could move to deny funding to the president.

“Now that the president has done his job, we have to do ours,” Shriver, a journalist, author and Alzheimer’s disease research advocate, said at the event. “We must convince Congress to approve the $12 billion investment the President has requested to make this bold vision a reality.”

If Congress allows the plan to move forward, the order would provide funding to accelerate research on menopause and help the National Institutes of Health (NIH) launch its first “Pathways to Prevention” series on menopause. enable it to launch.

Ms. Shriver said the president’s order is historic, especially given its focus on menopause.

“Today is probably the first time a president of the United States has signed an executive order that mentions the terms ‘menopause’ and ‘women’s midlife health,'” Shriver said at the event.

We know that women of color in the United States face disparities in access to reproductive health compared to white women due to both individual-level racial bias and structural racism in the health care system. Given this, further research on reproductive aging is particularly important for racial health equity. Black women, in particular, are more likely than white women to reach midlife with harmful physical symptoms.

“Black and dark-skinned women are more likely to develop endometriosis and face pregnancy-related complications,” Ms. Shriver said. “And we don’t have the research to tell them what to do about it. Most of the research that’s been done in this country has only been done on men, so we don’t have the research to tell them what to do about it. This is important because when you ask a question, you don’t get an answer.”

Beyond reproductive health, Biden’s order also funds research into mental health and substance use disorders, environmental health factors, and autoimmune diseases such as rheumatoid arthritis that particularly affect women.

Just before signing the executive order, Biden also repeated his repeated calls: “Send me a Democratic Congress that supports reproductive freedom, and I promise you that we will recover.” Roe vs. Wade again as the law of the country. ”