While MAGA Republicans are doing their best to undermine women’s rights, health, ability to succeed, President Biden has announced the first-ever White House initiative on Women’s Health Research, to be led by First Lady Jill Biden and the White House Gender Policy Council. The new initiative will fundamentally change how we approach and fund women’s health research. Presently, most medical research is conducted on men, with serious consequences for health of women across the country.Here is a fact sheet from the White House explaining the new initiative:
Despite making up more than half of the population, women have been understudied and underrepresented in health research for far too long. Research on women’s health is drastically underfunded, leading to significant research gaps, with serious consequences for the health of women across the country. This lack of investment limits our understanding of conditions that are specific to women, predominantly affect women, or affect women differently. In order to give women and their health care providers the tools and information that they need to more effectively prevent, diagnose, and treat these conditions – from rheumatoid arthritis to menopause to Alzheimer’s disease to cardiovascular disease to endometriosis – our nation must fundamentally change how we approach and fund women’s health research.
If we act swiftly, we can pioneer the next generation of discoveries in women’s health – improving the lives of millions of women. That’s why, today, President Biden is establishing a new White House Initiative on Women’s Health Research. This new effort will be led by First Lady Jill Biden, who has long championed women’s health, and the White House Gender Policy Council. The Initiative will be chaired by Dr. Carolyn Mazure, an esteemed leader in the field of women’s health research, who will coordinate the Initiative on behalf of the Office of the First Lady and the Gender Policy Council.
“I have always believed in the power of research to save lives and to ensure that Americans get the high-quality health care they need,” President Biden stated. “To achieve scientific breakthroughs and strengthen our ability to prevent, detect, and treat diseases, we have to be bold. That’s why today, we’re establishing a new White House Initiative on Women’s Health Research so that my Administration—from the National Institutes of Health to the Department of Defense—does everything we can to drive innovation in women’s health and close research gaps.”
“Every woman I know has a story about leaving her doctor’s office with more questions than answers,” commented First Lady Jill Biden. “Not because our doctors are withholding information, but because there’s just not enough research yet on how to best manage and treat even common women’s health conditions. In 2023, that is unacceptable. Our new White House Initiative on Women’s Health Research will help change that by identifying bold solutions to uncover the answers that every woman and her family deserves. We also are calling on congressional leaders, the private sector, research institutions, and philanthropy to join us in taking urgent action to improve the health and lives of women throughout the nation.”
PRESIDENTIAL MEMORANDUM ESTABLISHING WHITE HOUSE INITIATIVE ON WOMEN’S HEALTH RESEARCH
The White House Initiative on Women’s Health Research will galvanize the Federal government as well as the private and philanthropic sectors to spur innovation, unleash transformative investment to close research gaps, and improve women’s health. As a first step, through today’s Presidential Memorandum, the President is directing his Administration to:
Establish an Initiative consisting of executive departments and agencies across the Federal government. Initiative members include Federal agencies, such as the U.S. Departments of Health and Human Services, Defense, and Veterans Affairs, and White House offices, such as the Office of Management and Budget and the Office of Science and Technology Policy.
Deliver concrete recommendations to advance women’s health research. Within 45 days, Initiative members will recommend concrete actions that the Biden-Harris Administration can take to improve how research on women’s health is conducted and maximize the Administration’s investments in women’s health research, including to address health disparities and inequities.
Take a targeted, high-impact approach. To deliver results quickly, Initiative members will set priority areas of focus where additional investments could be transformative—in areas of research ranging from heart attacks in women to menopause.
Engage the scientific, private sector, and philanthropic communities. The Initiative will explore new public-private partnerships and engage private and philanthropic leaders to drive innovation and ensure the combined power of public, private, and philanthropic sectors advances research on women’s health.
Dr. Carolyn M. Mazure serves as the Chair of the White House Initiative on Women’s Health Research and has recently joined the Office of the First Lady. Dr. Mazure comes to the White House from the Yale School of Medicine, where she has served as the Norma Weinberg Spungen and Joan Lebson Bildner Professor in Women’s Health Research, and Professor of Psychiatry and Psychology. After three years at the National Institutes of Health and fellowship training at Yale, Dr. Mazure joined the Yale faculty as an active clinician and NIH-funded researcher. She created Women’s Health Research at Yale, the university’s interdisciplinary research center on the health of women, which studies a wide breadth of topics from cardiovascular disease to cancers. She holds a Ph.D. from Pennsylvania State University and did her fellowship and post-doctoral work at Yale School of Medicine.
Normally rote proclamations take on a sardonic, sarcastic, ironic tone when signed by Donald J. Trump.
It may surprise people that May 1 (in many places called May Day) is proclaimed Law Day – particularly ironic as Trump, insisting he doesn’t have to answer to the investigation into possible Russian collusion with his campaign and obstruction of justice while in office, is nothing but undermining the Rule of Law and the concept that “No Man is Above the Law.” He has said as much, in such statements echoing Nixon’s “When the President does it, well, that means it’s not illegal”. Or in his echo of Louis XIV’s “L’etat s’est moi” – when he decried the “raid” on his lawyer Michael Cohen as an attack on the nation (what does he make of sending his goons to raid his Dr. Bornstein’s office without any kind of warrant and steal his medical records over his pique at being outed for using a hair-growth prescription? That press shill Sarah Huckabee Sanders said was “routine” when someone becomes president? Does anyone recall any other president raiding their doctor’s office to seize records? ).
Here’s what Trump signed (and clearly did not write and likely never read):
On Law Day, we celebrate our Nation’s heritage of liberty, justice, and equality under the law. This heritage is embodied most powerfully in our Constitution, the longest surviving document of its kind. The Constitution established a unique structure of government that has ensured to our country the blessings of liberty through law for nearly 229 years.
The Framers of our Constitution created a government with distinct and independent branches — the Legislative, the Executive, and the Judicial — because they recognized the risks of concentrating power in one authority. As James Madison wrote, “the accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands . . . may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.” By separating the powers of government into three co-equal branches and giving each branch certain powers to check the others, the Constitution provides a framework in which the rule of law has flourished.
The importance of the rule of law can be seen throughout our Nation’s history.
It is not really a coincidence that May 1 (May Day, a celebration of Workers rights around the world, including in the US of A where May Day began), is also designated as Loyalty Day – a McCarthy-era direct assault on Communism (but apparently, not on Russia, which is no longer communist but fascist and Trump’s best bud).
Loyalty Day, just like National Prayer Day, is actually a violation of what this nation holds dear. In America, we are not supposed to be required to pledge allegiance, certainly not to swear “under God”. No doubt, Trump signed the proclamation, thinking that Loyalty Day meant to swear loyalty to himself, the Dear Leader. I have no doubt he actually read the proclamation:
On Loyalty Day, we reflect with humility and gratitude upon the freedoms we hold dear, and we reaffirm our allegiance to our Nation and its founding principles. We cherish our system of self-government, whereby each American citizen is free to exercise their God-given and inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. We honor and defend our Constitution, which constrains the power of government and allows us freely to exercise these rights. We also recognize the great responsibility that accompanies a free people and vow to preserve our hard-won liberty. For we know, as President Ronald Reagan once said, that “freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction.”
This Loyalty Day, we remember and honor the thousands of Americans who have laid down their lives to protect and defend our Nation’s beautiful flag.
May is also when this government has decided to hold the National Prayer Breakfast – another action (along with “In God We Trust” as a motto on money) to institutionalize the violation of the Constitution’s separation of church and state.
Instead, Trump went a step beyond what even George W. Bush did in setting up the Office of Faith Based Initiatives, to sign his own Faith-Based Initiative.
The nexus of Capitalism and Christian Zealotry came during the McCarthy era, when the notion of Christian charity was replaced by the Puritan concept that you got what you deserved, so rich people were rich because they deserved it; poor people were impoverished because they deserved it. Such zealotry was used to justify slavery as well as prohibiting abortion to rape victims.
Much of today’s malevolent political climate can be traced to the McCarthy era, including Trump’s own mentor, Roy Cohn, who was McCarthy’s own counsel, and taught Donnie everything he knows about attacking in order to evade legal or moral accountability.
And of course, May features Mothers Day… Trump’s proclamation for May 13, 2018 begins this way:
Mother’s Day is a very special occasion and opportunity to express our endless gratitude to the women who give their unyielding love and devotion to their families, and their unending sacrifices to guide, protect, and nurture the success of their children. Our country has long appreciated and benefited from the contributions women have made to empowering and inspiring not only those under their roofs, but those in our schools, communities, governments, and businesses…
Today, and every day, let us express our utmost respect, admiration, and appreciation for our mothers who have given us the sacred gifts of life and unconditional love. In all that they do, mothers influence their families, their communities, our Nation, and our world. Whether we became their children through birth, adoption, or foster care, we know the unmatched power of the love, dedication, devotion, and wisdom of our mothers.
Certainly, Trump cherishes motherhood so much, he had an affair with Stormy Daniels, among others, while Melania was still nursing 4-month old Barron.
This is the man who directs his administration to terrorize undocumented mothers, that they will be forced to abandon their American-citizen children, who pulls away parents who are the major breadwinners for their families, who have lived in the United States for decades and are contributing to their communities.
The precious sentiment of his Mothers Day proclamation is belied by the cruelty the Trump Administration has shown to refugees claiming asylum, purposefully separating children, even infants, from their parents in order to discourage people fleeing violence from attempting to find refuge in the United States.
“There is no law enforcement or other legitimate basis for separating children from their parents at the border,” Congressman Adam Schiff tweeted. “It is simply cruel. Imagine the terror of a young child in a strange land, pried away from his or her parents. Whatever happened to compassion or family values?”
“Arresting and ripping apart parents and children is a new low in demagoguery. It’s another reminder of President Trump’s failure to craft a genuine set of border laws and his inhumane outlook,” the San Francisco Chronicle wrote.
“It’s a chilling but predictable new low for an administration that reacts blindly and harshly to any mention of immigrants. Families may be fleeing persecution, seeking a better life or trying to find relatives already in the U.S.”
It doesn’t stop there. The Republicans, which just passed a tax scam that shifts $1.5 trillion in wealth from working people to the richest and adds that much to the national debt,so Trump is clawing back $7 billion in spending from the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP), and $252 million from a fund that earmarked to combat the Ebola outbreak.
Trump also is advocating for a Republican-pushed Farm Bill which cuts SNAP – the food stamp program that helps 40 million people, the majority who are children, seniors and disabled – by $20 billion, literally taking food from babes’ mouths. Attaching new work requirements to qualify for the very benefits that are necessary because wages have not kept pace, despite record corporate profits and now $1.5 trillion in tax windfall for the richest.
He also sheds crocodile tears for how devastating the opioid crisis has been. But what has Trump actually done to address the opioid crisis? And for that matter, what has he or the Republican majority done to solve the life/death problem of access to affordable health care, instead, making impossible demands for the very people most desperate for health care to access Medicaid.
Indeed, he chose Mother’s Day to proclaim the start of National Women’s Health Week the guy who is doing everything possible to shut down Planned Parenthood, to sabotage access to affordable health care, who would make being a woman a “pre-existing condition”, who appears to care less that the US is facing a maternal mortality crisis, that up to 900 women die from pregnancy or childbirth complications each year with Black women are 3 to 4 times more likely to die than white women from those complications, not to mention that a woman who suffers a miscarriage may well be jailed for infanticide. (See: Virginia Woman Given a Jail Sentence for “Concealing a Dead Body” After Her Stillbirth)
Trump proclaims:
This is an opportunity to honor the importance of women across America and renew our pledge to support their health and well being.
One of the most LOL ironic among the May proclamations was the one Trump issued as a nod to his wife, Melania, who after a year and a half as First Lady, finally declared her “agenda” branded as “Be Best” (which turns out to be copied from an Obama handbook on social media and bullying), declaring May 7, “Be Best Day”.
Trump’s remarks at this heralded event in which he followed up by signing a proclamation of “Be Best Day” did not speak at all to the essence of anti-bullying. No, not at all. It was all praise for Melania.
America is truly blessed to have a First Lady who is so devoted to our country and to our children.
On Be Best Day, we encourage and promote the well-being of children everywhere. In an increasingly complex and inter‑connected world, nothing is more important than raising the next generation of Americans to be healthy, happy, productive, and morally responsible adults. This begins with educating our children about the many critical issues they must confront in our modern world that affect their ability to lead balanced and fulfilled lives.
Our Nation’s children deserve certain knowledge that they are safe to grow, learn, and make mistakes. Adults must provide them with the tools they need to make positive contributions in their schools, with their friends, and in their communities.
It will surprise people that May is also Jewish American Heritage Month, and here we can recall Trump’s varied and many dogwhistles to bigotry and hate and his tacit encouragement of White Supremacists.
Jewish Americans have helped guide the moral character of our Nation… The contributions of the Jewish people to American society are innumerable, strengthening our Nation and making it more prosperous.
Lumping other minorities together in the same month’s celebrations, May is also Asian Americans and Pacific Islander Heritage Month, as a gratuitous nod to an appreciation of “diversity”:
Americans of Asian and Pacific Islander descent have contributed immeasurably to our Nation’s development and diversity as a people.
It’s also Older Americans Month, as Trump declared:
Our country and our communities are strong today because of the care and dedication of our elders. Their unique perspectives and experiences have endowed us with valuable wisdom and guidance, and we commit to learning from them and ensuring their safety and comfort.
My Administration is focused on the priorities of our Nation’s seniors. The Department of Justice, for example, is focused on protecting seniors from fraud and abuse. My Administration is also committed to protecting the Social Security system so that seniors who have contributed to the system can receive benefits from it. We are also dedicated to improving healthcare, including by increasing the quality of care our veterans receive through the Department of Veterans Affairs and by lowering prescription drug prices for millions of Americans.
Except that everything Trump’s administration has done goes against seniors, including rolling back the Consumer Financial Protection Board which helps seniors (and everyone else) address predatory tactics by financial industry, including Obama-era rules reining in PayDay lenders; has exploded the budget deficit in order to justify pulling billions out of Medicare and Social Security, is determined to narrow Medicaid, has sabotaged the Affordable Care Act resulting in higher premiums, and is risking the Veterans Administration’s ability to provide the specialized health care veterans require by its intent to privatize and put in charge Dr. Ronny with absolutely no experience whatsoever. And let’s examine again what this administration has not done to address opioid addiction or skyrocketing cost of prescription medication. What exactly has this administration done for seniors?
And now Republicans are taking $800 million out of Medicare and standing by as drug costs continue to skyrocket.
Of course, May finishes with Memorial Day, and Trump will no doubt pull out one of the proclamations that express such appreciation for those who have made the ultimate sacrifice to preserve America’s liberty and freedoms – 660,000 have died in all America’s wars since the Revolution (when 4,435 died), including 1,000 in the Indian Wars (1817-1898), 225,000 in the Civil War (140,414 for the Union, 74,524 Confederates); 53,402 in World War I, 291,557 in World War II, 33,739 in the Korean War, 47,434 in Vietnam and 6915 in the Global War on Terror (2001 to present).
Millions more have returned home, some with lifelong injuries both physical and mental. Trump’s answer to these Veterans isn’t the same as during Michelle Obama and Jill Biden’s Joining Forces campaign, or the efforts taken to improve access to health care and other services including a new GI Bill. Trump is moving forward with plans to privatize the Veterans Administration which is opposed by most veterans.
We ask so much of our military spouses: frequent moves; heartbreaking separations; parenting alone; incomplete celebrations; and weeks, months, and sometimes years of waiting for a loved one’s safe return from harm’s way. Time and time again, however, military spouses respond with resilience that defies explanation. Our service members are often praised as national heroes, but their spouses are equally worthy of that distinction.
My Administration is committed to taking care of our Armed Forces and ensuring that our military is equipped to defend our country and protect our way of life. This mission also includes caring for the unique needs of military spouses, whose service to our Nation cannot be overstated.
