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President Joe Biden will sign an executive order Monday aimed at expanding research on women’s health care, including strengthening data standards.
The president is also expected to announce more than 20 new actions and commitments by federal agencies, including $200 million for research at the National Institutes of Health. The White House described the investments as a first step toward a “Fund on Women’s Health” that Biden called on Congress to invest in during his State of the Union address this month.
The executive actions follow first lady Jill Biden’s announcement last month of $100 million in funding for women’s health.
“Never before has there been such a comprehensive effort from the federal government to spur innovation, women’s health and ensure that relevant federally funded research works harder for women. This is a huge opportunity for transformative change and will help improve the health and lives of women all across the country,” Carolyn Mazure, chairperson of the White House Initiative on Women’s Health Research, said during a press call Sunday afternoon.
She noted that although women make up half of the population, research into women’s health has been underfunded and understudied.
“While we’ve made tremendous progress over the last two decades, from revolutionary discoveries in certain disorders affecting women to increasing the number of women enrolled in clinical trials, we still know too little about how to effectively prevent, diagnose, and treat a wide array of health conditions in women, conditions that have different symptoms for women and men,” including heart disease, rheumatoid arthritis and Alzheimer’s disease, as well as conditions unique to women, such as endometriosis and fibroids, Mazure said.
The president and the first lady launched the White House initiative on women’s health research in November. Jill Biden has spearheaded the effort by traveling across the country to tour research institutions and speak with women and health care innovators about the need to transform women’s health research, Mazure said.
Jen Klein, director of the White House Gender Policy Council, said the announcements on women’s health research build on the president’s call on Congress to invest $12 billion in new funding for it during his State of the Union address, which includes establishing a central fund for women’s health at the NIH that, in part, will create a nationwide network dedicated to studying the subject.
The president is directing federal agencies “to integrate women’s health across the federal research portfolio,” prioritizing investment in research and innovation through entities like the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health ARPA-H and the Small Business Innovation Research program, Klein said. The effort aims to galvanize research on women’s midlife health, including post-menopause diseases and conditions such as heart attacks, Alzheimer’s disease and osteoporosis, and “to assess unmet needs to support women’s health research by identifying gaps in federal funding and requiring agencies to report on their progress in improving women’s health,” she said.
The executive order comes in the wake of widespread backlash over a recent Alabama Supreme Court’s ruling on in vitro fertilization treatments that said embryos are considered to be children, prompting state Republicans to swiftly pass bills to protect the procedure.
Biden has repeatedly condemned the Supreme Court’s overturning of the landmark Roe v. Wade ruling in 2022, and Democrats have made reproductive rights a major focal point in their 2024 campaigns.
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