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.

Why Women Need a Hormonal Bill of Rights

PUBLISHED 10/12/2026 by

For too long, midlife symptoms of women have been minimized; our concerns dismissed, our suffering normalized and our voices overlooked. We reject the notion that hormonal decline is simply something to endure.

Everyone has the right to connection, support, shared knowledge, honest conversation free from shame and community in search of quality of life.

To ask questions.
To demand answers.
To require equal research.
To expect better healthcare.
To defy patriarchal control.
To hormonally radicalize the world.

Restricting Mifepristone Access Could Empower Abusers

PUBLISHED 10/7/2026 by

The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals heard arguments on Sept. 9 in Louisiana v. FDA, one of three cases threatening nationwide access to mifepristone, the medication used in the majority of abortions in the United States. 

While its stakes center on access to mifepristone generally, survivors of intimate partner violence (IPV) may be among the hardest hit by a national restriction on the abortion care drug.  

Already living under extreme, sometimes life-threatening, circumstances, survivors have vanishingly few options to care for themselves in the event of a pregnancy. Telehealth treatment and access to mifepristone by mail have been one of the few reprieves offered thus far, and their restriction could pose grave consequences to survivors nationwide.

You Deserve Better Menopause Care. Here’s How to Demand It.

PUBLISHED 10/5/2026 by

“As women we have become way too comfortable with suffering,” said menopause expert Dr. Sharon Malone, MD, at a New York City book launch event for Jennifer Weiss-Wolf’s When in Menopause. “Menopause is just the last on the long train of suffering stops we’ve had.”

Weiss-Wolf’s new book makes the case for changing that, from demanding better care in the doctor’s office to fighting for policies that take women’s health seriously. As she put it during the conversation: “We’re saying we demand to be seen. We demand to be heard.”

In the following excerpt, Weiss-Wolf offers practical guidance for becoming your own best champion and receiving informed, respectful midlife healthcare.

When in Menopause: A User’s Manual and Citizen’s Guide is out Tuesday, Oct. 6, from Sheldon Press.

After Her Near-Fatal Pregnancy Crisis, Amanda Zurawski Is Finally a Mom

PUBLISHED 10/1/2026 by

In 2022, Amanda Zurawski became a national figure after she nearly died from pregnancy complications in Texas. Zurawski had conceived that pregnancy through intrauterine insemination (IUI), but when her water broke at 18 weeks, doctors delayed abortion care until she developed life-threatening sepsis. The infection left severe scarring in her reproductive organs, leading her and her husband, Josh, to pursue IVF and a surrogate, who gave birth to their son, August, on Sept. 13.

“August Mikel James Zurawski was born on Sep. 13, and he is happy and healthy. We are the happiest. … For the present, we hope to stay in Texas and fight. But now we have someone else to think about.”

Antiabortion Politics Blocks Research on Fibroids, Endometriosis and Breast Cancer. The Media Is Finally Paying Attention.

PUBLISHED 10/1/2026 by

Mifepristone is known as the abortion pill, but it has other uses most Americans have never heard about. For more than three decades, scientists have known this medication could do far more than end a pregnancy. Research shows mifepristone and a similar drug ulipristal acetate (sold under the brand name ella) can shrink fibroids, treat endometriosis and may treat and even prevent breast cancer.

Despite this huge potential to improve women’s health and well-being, abortion opponents have obstructed research into these treatments for decades, fearing anything that could make mifepristone more available would weaken their fight against abortion.

The burden of this obstruction has fallen on women, left to suffer from years of painful fibroids and endometriosis, heavy bleeding and reduced fertility, or death from aggressive forms of breast cancer, while research that could help sits on the shelf.

For years, the fight to unlock mifepristone’s lifesaving potential was a story only feminist media would tell, but mainstream media is finally catching up.

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 percent of men.

Medical research is becoming more representative, but much of today’s evidence was collected when male bodies were more often treated as standard. Careful design could help AI identify patterns that older research missed.

As tomorrow’s healthcare is built from yesterday’s records, researchers must ask whether an apparent difference reflects biology or the way patients encountered healthcare. Otherwise old assumptions could become embedded in new technology.

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 | UPDATED 9/29/2026 at 11:49 A.M. PT

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.