WASHINGTON, D.C. (The Daily Whatever Press)—On Monday, Melania Trump stood in the Rose Garden—the one her husband paved over—and announced that America’s women would finally get the attention they deserve. “Beginning today,” she said, “we will change the reality of women’s health.”
Beginning today. Sure.
Women have been screaming about this shit since before half of Congress could pronounce “endometriosis,” and the cavalry rode in exactly two weeks before a midterm election in which, according to The New York Times, only about one-third of American women say they support Trump and the GOP. What incredible timing. Truly, the stars aligned.
Three things landed in about 24 hours. Any one of them would ruin my evening. Stacked together, they tell you exactly how much this administration values women’s health.
Like literally, it’s less than a scratched used copy of Jagged Little Pill at a yard sale, and at least that has a song about irony.
Shot one: the initiative isn’t new—and isn’t funded
Here is everything the executive order does: it creates a new Women’s Health Division at the National Institutes of Health, plus a White House Women’s Health Task Force. Here’s what it costs: nothing. Here’s how much budget the task force has: again, nothing. No dedicated funding, no appropriations, no targets, not even a Bed Bath & Beyond coupon.
Trump told the crowd he was stunned a women’s health division didn’t already exist, and recounted Melania asking him who the hell wouldn’t have one.
Great question, Melania! We googled that for you, and turns out, the NIH has had an Office of Research on Women’s Health since 1990, when George H. W. Bush was president. It exists because women were barely being included in clinical research, and it’s spent 36 years doing the work this administration just “discovered.” Thanks for asking!!
And while they were busy reinventing the wheel, they slashed the tire. The order formally revokes Jill Biden’s women’s health research effort, which the previous administration estimates mobilized about $1 billion in federal research funding. Subtract a billion dollars, add letterhead, hold a press conference. New Math, motherfuckers.
And here’s the thing: if this initiative ever does get money—which it likely won’t—we all know where the “women’s health” focus will go, right? The one part of women’s health this crowd has ever shown real enthusiasm for is the part that makes more Americans. Menopause, heart disease, Alzheimer’s—they made it into the press release. I’ll believe they made it into a budget when I see a line item.
Shot two: RFK Jr. is running women’s health now
The task force will be led by HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Trump introduced him with a laugh: “He’s a little different. We understand that, don’t we?”
Oh, we understand. And we hate it. This is the man who founded the anti-vaccine nonprofit Children’s Health Defense. This is the man whose HHS, in 2025, moved to cut funding for the actual Women’s Health Initiative—a decades-long study that enrolled more than 160,000 women—and backed down only after scientists raised hell. This is the man a former nanny accused, in Vanity Fair, of sexually assaulting her in 1998.
The guy who tried to defund the biggest women’s health study in American history, who pronounced the HPV vaccine “dangerous,” is now in charge of making women’s health history. Yeah. That’s just fucking fabulous.
Shot three: the next morning, in Idaho
The day after the Rose Garden ceremony, The New York Times Magazine published Lisa Lerer’s reporting on what women’s health actually looks like in Idaho four years after Roe fell.
Idaho’s near-total ban makes performing an abortion a felony carrying at least two years in prison, and the doctors did the math. The numbers are terrifying. More than a third of the state’s OB-GYNs have stopped practicing obstetrics or left since 2022. By the end of last year, Idaho had only 170 obstetricians for roughly a million women. Half of its 44 counties have none. Three rural hospitals have closed their labor and delivery wards since 2023. In Boise, a hysterectomy can take six months to schedule and an annual exam? Nine months.
In Moscow, Idaho, a family doctor finished a C-section, discovered the placenta had grown into the uterine wall, and kept her patient on the table—abdomen open—for nearly an hour while the on-call OB drove in from Washington. Another woman, whose baby had died in the second trimester, labored for two days because her doctor couldn’t find mifepristone on either side of the state line. Patients now tell that doctor, “I love you, Dr. Parker, but I can’t have my baby with you.”
Outside the hospital, the signs read Idaho Values Life.
Clearly.
And it isn’t only Idaho
Idaho has no OB-GYN residency program, so there’s no pipeline to replace the doctors who left. Nationally, the pipeline is drying up in exactly the states that passed the bans this movement demanded. According to the Association of American Medical Colleges, applicants to residency programs in ban states fell 4.2% in the 2023–24 cycle, compared with less than 1% in states where abortion is legal. The head of the Idaho Medical Association told the Times that some recruits feel safer in Utah, which also bans abortion but doesn’t criminalize care for pregnancy complications. ProPublica has documented at least four Texans who died after being denied prompt abortion care.
They passed the laws. The doctors read them and left. Funny how that works.
Idaho votes on restoring abortion rights in November. The legislature can undo the result by simple majority the very next session.
I’m raising two daughters. By the time they’re my age, I want them to inherit a medical system that studies women’s bodies as if they matter for their own sake, staffed by doctors who can treat a miscarriage without lawyering up first. What they got on Monday was a ribbon on an empty box.
“Beginning today, we will change the reality of women’s health,” Melania proclaimed during her Rose Garden speech. Idaho already did. Ask the woman who waited with her guts exposed for an hour on the operating table how well that’s going.
My rallying cry is different. Beginning today, and through November 3, we can vote to change the reality of women’s health.
Let’s fucking go.
Hi, I’m Dana — and I Write Out Loud
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RFKJr cut me a break! This regime abhors women period! This didn’t deserve press coverage! Melania didn’t have any problems birthing Barron, but she couldn’t keep her husband penis from roaming! Can he sign an executive order against violence against women!
Be Ware! She is actually saying “Be Nothing. We aim to get all you have.”