the trends we spotted this week that mattered most to women’s health:

💉 Can women’s health ever be apolitical? Maria Shriver called on her cousin, HHS Secretary RFK Jr., to stop turning women’s health into a partisan fight, while an economist warned that eliminating Title X funding would gut access to contraception and affect the future of women and children’s opportunities in America.

🩺 Surgery got a closer look. Studies this week highlighted that late-stage C-sections can leave poorly healing cervical scars and that mastectomy patients face worse emotional and sexual-health outcomes. The research may finally be forcing long-overdue conversations about quality of recovery, not just survival.

🧠 One step forward, one step back. Harvard’s Wyss Institute unveiled a menstrual “organ-on-a-chip,” a promising tool for modeling bleeding disorders mice can’t replicate, while the viral apple-cider-vinegar weight-loss study was retracted.