First Lady of the United States Jill Biden has invited 20 guests to sit with her while President Joe Biden delivers his State of the Union address tonight.
They include Latorya Beasley, a woman from Alabama whose in vitro fertilization treatments were stopped after a state court decision; Kate Cox, a woman from Texas who was denied an abortion in the state after learning the fetus had a lethal abnormality that is almost always fatal at birth, and journalist Maria Shriver, founder of the Women’s Alzheimer’s Movement.
Shriver, the niece of the late U.S. president John F. Kennedy, and ex-wife of movie star and former California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, has been working with the FLOTUS on the Women’s Health Research Initiative. Shriver announced that last week $100 million in federal funding from the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health will be allocated to research aimed at women’s health.
I have been working with @flotus on the Women’s Health Research Initiative, and last week, $100 million in federal funding was announced or research and development into women’s health from the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health.
Maria Shriver
As seen in the video below, Shriver said: “Women make up two-thirds of the cases of all Alzheimer’s cases and no one knows why that is.” She also noted that more women suffer from MS than men, and 80% of individuals with autoimmune diseases are women.
For years, I’ve been trying get answers to questions, questions about women’s health. For years I’ve heard the same thing over and over, “We don’t know.” How is it that we don’t know about half our population? Because we haven’t researched them! Women have been ignored in… pic.twitter.com/UHbnFYjaNk
— Maria Shriver (@mariashriver) March 5, 2024
According to the Alzheimer’s Association, “Nearly two-thirds of the more than 5 million Americans living with Alzheimer’s are women and two-thirds of the more than 15 million Americans providing care and support for someone with Alzheimer’s disease are women.”
The reasons for this strange imbalance in health outcomes remains a mystery. According to the National MS Society: “Doctors don’t know for certain why MS affects more women than men. Studies point to the roles of female hormones, vitamin D, inflammation and obesity.”
Shriver said she hopes it’s not just the federal government that will get involved in studying women’s health and called out to “all the tech companies, the innovators, the inventors, the game changers” in what she described as “a massive undertaking.”
