What ‘Women’s Health’ Should Have Meant All Along

The Left pretends to care about women’s health, but the Right is actually doing something about it. 

First Lady Melania Trump on Monday unveiled a new initiative that would create a Women’s Health Division at the National Institutes of Health, as well as a White House Women’s Health Task Force. Where the Left has long conflated “women’s health care” with expanded access to contraception and abortion, conservatives are ushering in a golden age of AI-fueled discovery. 

When I served as the special assistant for global women’s health during the first Trump administration, we recognized that when “women’s health” is synonymous with “contraception and abortion,” women and children suffer. We fought for what we called “optimal women’s health care,” which promotes the health of women across the lifespan; prioritizes the highest possible standard of well-being, including physical, intellectual, emotional, social, and spiritual health; and recognizes that when a society has healthy women and mothers, families and entire communities stand to benefit. We also prevented $153 million in taxpayer dollars from funding organizations that perform and promote abortion as a method of family planning, such as the International Planned Parenthood Federation and Marie Stopes International.

But when the Biden administration took over in 2021, the new women’s health lead worked to undo our progress. My former office, now led by Biden appointees, assisted in launching a first-of-its-kind White House Gender Policy Council, which promoted reproductive “rights,” abortion, LGBTQ equality, and gender equality in foreign assistance, among other things. The Biden Gender Policy Council was involved in the administration’s reinterpretation of the Comstock Act, which is supposed to prohibit the mailing of abortion pills. The illegal Biden-era interpretation of Comstock still stands and, until it is reversed, renders pro-life state laws meaningless. 

But while the Biden administration was using taxpayer dollars to fund the organizations that perform abortions abroad (something 77% of Americans oppose), one in 10 American women suffered from endometriosis, and one in eight suffered from polyendocrine metabolic ovarian syndrome (PMOS), for which it takes on average seven and five years to be diagnosed, respectively. Thankfully, those are two of the many conditions the new Women’s Health Division and White House Women’s Health Task Force are targeting under the first lady’s leadership.

The task force will be led by White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, whose own breast cancer journey will undoubtedly inform her leadership, and Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., whose office has already championed several health gains for women, including removing the black-box warning on hormone replacement therapy for menopause, creating new federal grant opportunities for clinics that prioritize root-cause treatment of infertility, and giving a grant for a National Infertility Training Center. USA Today reports that the new division “won’t replace the NIH Office of Research on Women’s Health … [but] will extend beyond research, coordinating agencies to accelerate scientific discoveries and improve healthcare for girls and women.”

The initiative prioritizes women’s health at every life stage: “from young girls just starting out to mothers dealing with a complex range of responsibilities, to mature women who deserve to have vitality, dignity, and independence,” the first lady said. The executive order calls for research in “cardiovascular and heart disease, cancer, stroke, Alzheimer’s Disease, autoimmune and inflammatory conditions, osteoporosis, mental health, chronic pain, endometriosis, fibroids, polyendocrine metabolic ovary syndrome, infertility, maternal health, menopause, neurological disorders, aging, and more.”

As a mom of four and a policy wonk in bioethics and emerging reproductive technology, I’m particularly excited about the opportunities for further research and discovery in root-cause treatments for infertility. But I’m also excited that, perhaps for the first time in over 60 years, we will begin treating women’s pain as an actual problem to be solved, rather than a symptom to be managed with a birth control pill. I’m hopeful that instead of selling women’s fertility back to them in their 30s via expensive and invasive IVF, we will give women access to healthy treatments that enable them to conceive naturally. And I look forward to the development of technologies that actually serve the health and flourishing of women, rather than treating their bodies as interchangeable with men’s.

The many positive responses to the Trumps’ new initiative are an indication that women of every political stripe are tired of the Left’s status quo for women’s health and are ready for real innovation. As it turns out, taking care of the health of women at home is much more popular than exporting contraception and abortion around the globe. Women deserve better — and they’re finally getting it.

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Katelyn Walls Shelton is the former special assistant for global women’s health at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and a visiting fellow in bioethics at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.

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