Women’s Health

Women everywhere deserve accessible, affordable and comprehensive healthcare. This includes reproductive healthcare like contraception, abortion, sex and relationship education, STI prevention and treatment, cancer screenings and counseling. However, lawmakers have long attempted to restrict or reduce this care in ways that harm women.

Decades of Male-Focused Medical Research Could Bias Healthcare AI

PUBLISHED 9/21/2026 by and

Many people will learn CPR using a flat-chested manikin. A 2024 study of 20 models of CPR manikins sold worldwide found that three-quarters were described as male or had no sex specified. Of the 20, only one offered a breast overlay.

The manikins reflect a wider tendency in medical teaching and research to treat the male body as standard. The terms “male and female” and “men and women” in this article reflect the sources, which often fail to distinguish sex from gender or say whether gender-diverse people were included.

The lack of female representation can have consequences. In a U.S. study of 19,331 out-of-hospital cardiac arrests, 39 percent of women who collapsed in public received bystander CPR, compared with 45% of men.

Activists Have Fought for Disability Justice. So-Called ‘Sickfluencers’ Still Face Medical Sexism.

PUBLISHED 9/16/2026 by

Mainstream legacy media in the U.K. has found a new target: young disabled women.

Last week, Telegraph editor Poppy Coburn published “How having a disability became cool,” arguing so-called “sickfluencers” are “turning chronic illness into a lifestyle trend.” Just a month earlier, Times of London columnist Kathleen Stock suggested the disproportionate number of Gen Z women diagnosed with what she called “vague syndromes” may be experiencing “social contagion.” Both pieces cast suspicion on young disabled women and the ways they discuss chronic illness and use mobility aids, reflecting a growing strain of far-right rhetoric that treats disabled women’s accounts of their own bodies with suspicion.

Care Robots, Health Chatbots and the False Promise of Feminist AI

PUBLISHED 9/16/2026 by

Despite the fact that AI seems to be everywhere these days, a surprising recent poll from NBC News found that AI is even less popular among the US public than ICE. So it is no wonder the same industry that is developing AI for corporate gain and warfare is moving into the seemingly benevolent fields of reproductive health, elder care, emotional support, education, therapy chatbots and intimacy. 

AI may promise solutions, but artificial feminist intelligence can’t replace the relationships, care and systemic change in demand.

Half the Country, a Fraction of the Research

PUBLISHED 9/15/2026 by

For decades, Democratic and Republican administrations alike presided over a medical research system that routinely excluded women. The result? Modern medicine was built on incomplete science—and women are still paying the price. 

It wasn’t until the NIH Revitalization Act of 1993 that federally funded clinical trials were required to include women. Yet changing who participates in research does not rewrite decades of medical knowledge overnight. By then, physicians had already been trained using male-centered evidence, diagnostic standards had been established, and countless drugs had already been dosed using evidence derived solely from men.  

In 2025, the Trump administration has proposed cutting the NIH’s budget by roughly 43 percent (equivalent to $20 billion per year). Its broader HHS budget proposal called for eliminating or consolidating several programs supporting family planning and maternal and child health. Federal agencies also came under pressure to scrutinize or reject grant proposals containing terms such as women, leading to paused or cancelled fellowships and research on conditions such as uterine fibroids and pregnancy. 

There are signs, however, that Congress may finally be beginning to treat women’s health across the lifespan as a serious policy issue.

On Sept. 16, the Senate Special Committee on Aging will hold Congress’ first-ever hearing devoted to menopause. Led by ranking member Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.), “Half the Country, Zero Hearings: Meeting the Moment to End the Menopause Care Gap in America” will examine the nation’s lack of menopause research, informed medical care and provider training—and make the case for greater federal investment.

The hearing represents an overdue step forward. But women’s health cannot remain vulnerable to political cycles. Regardless of which party holds power, it must become a permanent priority within American policy and medicine.

‘It’s About Who Gets to Decide’: Massachusetts Will No Longer Impose a Gestational Limit on Access to Abortion Care

PUBLISHED 9/9/2026 by

Gov. Maura Healey signed the Prioritizing Patient Access to Care Act into law last month, making Massachusetts the 10th state, together with Washington, D.C., that does not impose a gestational limit on access to abortion care.

In so doing, Healey stressed the “heartbreaking stories” she heard “from women and families who were preparing to welcome a healthy baby into their family, only to receive devastating news later in their pregnancy. Instead of being able to rely on the doctors they knew and trusted at home, they were forced to travel hundreds of miles and pay out of their pockets while navigating unimaginable grief.”

I recently had the privilege of talking with Kate Dineen who shared her tragic experience of being denied abortion care in Massachusetts because of the state’s “24-week ban with very difficult to access exceptions.” 

Here is her story.

Keshia Golden’s Plea Deal Kept Her Out of Prison—But Don’t Mistake It for Justice

PUBLISHED 8/31/2026 by

Keshia Golden’s attorneys say that in October 2022, while she was eight-plus months pregnant, her then-boyfriend Calvin Sidney hit her, grabbed her hair and slammed her head against a kitchen counter. Golden grabbed a kitchen knife and stabbed Sidney in the leg. Golden only intended to make him stop, she has always insisted. But she hit the femoral artery. Sidney died at a Chicago hospital.

Keshia Golden was charged with first-degree murder and held in jail, where, weeks from giving birth, she was transferred to the medical unit to recover from her injuries. Four years passed.

Then, on Aug. 24, 2026, just before Golden’s trial was to begin, the Cook County state’s attorney Eileen O’Neill Burke offered Golden a last-minute deal: If she pled guilty to involuntary manslaughter and underwent two years of community service, drug testing and probation, she would serve no prison time.

All evidence points to the fact that Golden acted in self-defense and should never have been charged in the first place.

Nonetheless, she accepted the plea.

Her acceptance of this lesser charge is not an admission of guilt. It’s also not justice.

Golden is a single mother who was forced to make an impossible choice to ensure she would be able to raise her 3-year-old daughter. “All she has is me,” Golden said in court. 

Now, the only remaining path to justice for Golden is a pardon from Gov. JB Pritzker. Such a pardon would send a clear message: No woman should have to die to prove that she was a victim. No one should be punished for surviving abuse, defending themselves or protecting their child.

FreeBC Offers Reliable Info on All Kinds of Birth Control *and* Free Contraception to Anyone in Colorado, With Plans to Expand Nationwide

PUBLISHED 8/26/2026 by

In this age of legal attacks on birth control access and shifting Medicaid coverage, a new online resource has emerged to educate people about the birth control methods available to them and provide them for no fee.

The website FreeBC now offers comprehensive information about every effective birth control method—from pills, patches and rings, to IUDs and implants.

After exploring their options, users can then schedule a telehealth appointment with a healthcare professional. After a patient decides which form of birth control they want to start with, FreeBC will either send it in the mail in discreet packaging or help the patient find a nearby clinic if needed for a method like IUD insertion. 

FreeBC is currently available only in Colorado, with plans to expand soon to patients in additional states.

Talking Back to Dobbs: Federal Judge Says Idaho Can’t Force Pregnant Women to ‘Endure All Harm Short of Death’

PUBLISHED 8/26/2026 by | UPDATED 8/28/2026 at 7:17 A.M. PT

A federal district court issued the first post-Dobbs decision recognizing the U.S. Constitution still protects the right to abortion in specific circumstances.

And while legal opinions rarely move me to tears—as even the most progressive outcomes are typically cloaked in legal jargon that does not communicate the often urgent or tragic human experience underlying the case—Judge B. Lynn Winmill’s deeply attentive opinion in Seyb did just that.

Idaho has one of the nation’s strictest abortion regimes: Abortion is generally criminalized at every stage of pregnancy, with narrow exceptions. As Winmill writes, as a direct consequence of this ban, “a woman’s body itself is conscripted into service and forced to bear permanent damage in service of the potential life she carries.”

Winmill ruled Idaho’s abortion ban was unconstitutional on two grounds.

1. It violated the 14th Amendment’s Due Process Clause by denying pregnant patients a fundamental right to medically indicated abortion care.

2. By excluding self-harming behavior from the law’s life-saving exception, it denied patients with mental-health conditions equal protection under the 14th Amendment.

In their initial complaint, the plaintiff Dr. Seyb and his legal team that the requested relief “will address only a fraction of the harm that Idaho’s Abortion Bans are causing.” While meaningful, they wrote, such relief alone cannot secure justice for all Idaho residents; that would require repeal of the abortion bans through legislation or direct democracy—or the Supreme Court’s reversal of Dobbs.

Voters may soon have an opportunity to pursue that broader relief: In the upcoming midterms, Idahoans can cast a vote in favor of the Idaho Reproductive Freedom and Privacy Act, a ballot initiative to restore abortion access in the state.

Beyond Abortion: How the ERA Could Transform Pregnancy, Work and Family Life

PUBLISHED 8/26/2026 by

On March 31, 1776, Abigail Adams wrote a letter to her husband, John, beseeching him to “remember the ladies” as he and his peers were drafting the Declaration of Independence. She warned, “All Men would be tyrants if they could” and urged him to “not put such unlimited power into the hands of the Husbands.”

He ignored her warning when she wrote: “If particular care and attention is not paid to the Ladies we are determined to foment a Rebellion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any Laws in which we have no voice, or Representation.”

Now, 250 years later, women are still fighting for inclusion.

The potential for state ERAs to advance the rights of women and girls is tremendous, but only if we have the will—and the resources—to push for favorable state supreme courts and to use ERAs to challenge discriminatory government policies.

While we fight for a Congress that will publish the federal ERA and a U.S. Supreme Court that will robustly interpret it, feminists are building an ERA jurisprudence that will one day achieve Abigail Adams’ dream: for women to finally, truly, be equal citizens and live freely, safely and empowered throughout the United States.

Girls Have Always Had ADHD. We Just Weren’t Looking.

PUBLISHED 8/24/2026 by

A teenage girl watches a 30-second TikTok video by @Clairebear describing “a day in hell” in her life, “ADD edition”:

“I get up and go to work and realize I don’t have gas in my car. I get to the gas station and reach for my credit card and remember that I don’t in fact have my card because I keep thinking it will turn up at some point.”

She continues explaining her day and reveals that these are all symptoms and signs of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).

The teenage girl in question sees much of herself in that scenario, goes to the doctor and is evaluated and diagnosed.

Welcome to modern medicine.