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EVERYTHING
Expert Reactions to Adding a Women’s Health-Focused NIH Institute
What: Science digs into the National Academies recommendation that NIH add a dedicated institute for women’s health research, and whether it’s likely to come to fruition.
Key line: “The proposal is getting a mixed response from NIH observers, who laud its goals but say a new institute is unlikely to happen at a time when both incoming President-elect Donald Trump’s administration and congressional Republicans are intent on overhauling NIH…. Senator Patty Murray (D–WA), who heads one of the congressional spending committees that requested the report, adds: ‘Women’s health research has, for too long, been underfunded and overlooked, and as this report makes clear, there’s still a long way to go.’”
Source: Science
PREGNANCY + POSTPARTUM
Young, Pregnant, and Murdered in America
What: The New York Times has an interactive piece on how women under 25 who get pregnant see their odds of being murdered more than double. The cause is often domestic violence, and the piece highlights the story of a young mom of 9-month-old twins who was killed by her boyfriend.
Key line: “Homicide deaths are usually omitted from maternal mortality statistics because they aren’t considered sufficiently related to the pregnancy itself. But homicide isn’t a rare anomaly for pregnant and postpartum women — it’s one of their leading causes of death. This makes pregnancy-associated homicides, as they’re called by epidemiologists and health researchers, a real public health concern.”
Source: The New York Times
ABORTION ACCESS
Abortion Battles in 2025: States Brace for Federal Overreach
What: Slate digs into the challenges abortion providers will face under the Trump administration – even in states where abortion care is legal. Mary Ziegler reports on the legal twists and turns ahead, especially with cases already working through federal courts.
Key line: “It may seem that efforts to criminalize speech will be constitutionally dead on arrival. In reality, as a recent decision over an Idaho law by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit shows, the fight to undercut reproductive rights will pose new, complicated threats to the freedom of speech in the years to come.”
Source: Slate
PERIMENOPAUSE
Everything Perimenopause: A Q+A
What: A conversational Q+A on everything perimenopause, covering the broad questions (will I go insane?) to the narrow (will deodorant stop working?). And they are answered with expert takes wherever possible.
Key line: “Because perimenopause precedes menopause, defined to have started when you’ve gone 12 full months without a period, it’s easier to pinpoint the start of one’s perimenopause retroactively — which, I know, is not that helpful right now. ‘I look back now, and I think, Oh my goodness, I probably experienced symptoms for about 10 or 12 years,’ says Newson. ‘But I didn’t realize because they’re quite insidious initially, and you don’t really join the dots.’”
Source: The Cut
ENDOMETRIOSIS
Endometriosis Drug Development Faces Persistent Challenges
What: Despite improved understanding of endometriosis, drug development is slow thanks to unclear root causes and a lack of representation in clinical trials. The article digs into how figuring out the biological mechanisms of the disease could pave the way for breakthroughs.
Key line: “For instance, researchers sometimes use biobanks — collections of medical and biological data from tissue, blood and DNA samples — to identify molecular markers of a disease, or develop effective diagnostics. If collected by a government-funded program, the data is often published or made available to scientists, providing a starting point for drug research. But such resources are more limited in endometriosis, according to Baburek and Joseph Nassif, an associate professor of obstetrics and gynecology at Baylor College of Medicine and a clinician.”
Source: BioPharma Dive
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