WASHINGTON (AP) — President Joe Biden said Wednesday he is “so proud” that a women’s health research initiative he launched last year at his wife’s urging has already invested nearly $1 billion as a healthy female population continues to boost U.S. prosperity improves.
“That is a fact,” he said in his closing address at the first White House conference on women’s health research. “We haven’t passed that on to the other team yet,” Biden said, referring to newly elected President Donald Trump and his new administration.
Trump’s three conservative Supreme Court nominees from his first term as president have voted to overturn women’s constitutional right to abortion. In this year’s election, Democrats campaigned on reproductive rights and women’s health issues.
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Karoline Leavitt, spokesperson for Trump’s transition team, said the president-elect will keep his promise to improve health in the US
“President Trump campaigned on making America healthy again for ALL Americans, including men, women and children, and he will deliver on that promise,” Leavitt said in an email.
Women make up half of the U.S. population, about 168 million people, but medical research into their unique health conditions is largely underfunded and understudied, officials say.
Jill Biden has said she proposed the idea for the White House Initiative on Women’s Health Research to the president after Maria Shriver, herself an advocate for women’s health and a member of the influential Kennedy political family, presented it to her.
The first lady told researchers, advocates and business and philanthropic leaders attending the conference that she will continue to press the issue after she leaves office.
“My work doesn’t stop in January when Joe and I leave this house,” she said. “I will continue to build alliances like the ones that brought us here today, and I will continue to push for funding for innovative research.”
The first lady said the U.S. economy loses about $1.8 billion in work time each year due to the effects of menopause on women. And she’s eager to learn more about extreme morning sickness during pregnancy.
“I heard this a few weeks ago and I was especially interested because my own granddaughter was going through the same thing because we’re going to be great-grandparents,” Jill Biden said.
Granddaughter Naomi Biden Neal and her husband, Peter Neal, are expecting their first child.
Since its launch, the women’s health research initiative has attracted nearly $1 billion in federal funding, including from the Department of Defense and the National Institutes of Health.
“Within a year, everyone in this room was in an uproar,” Shriver said at the conference. “It wasn’t until the Bidens that anyone ever thought about making women’s health and research a priority for the federal government, so let that sink in.”
President Biden closed the conference with a nod to the influence of his wife, who sat in the front row after her remarks next to their daughter Ashley Biden, who runs a women’s shelter in Philadelphia.
“You’ve gone the extra mile, boy,” Biden told the first lady. He then told the audience, “In case you’re wondering, when she speaks, I listen.”
