By DARLENE SUPERVILLE
WASHINGTON (AP) — President Joe Biden mentioned Wednesday that he’s “so proud” {that a} girls’s well being analysis initiative he launched final yr at his spouse’s urging has already invested almost $1 billion as a result of a wholesome feminine inhabitants improves U.S. prosperity.
“That’s a fact,” he mentioned in closing remarks on the first White Home Convention on Girls’s Well being Analysis. “We haven’t gotten that through to the other team yet,” Biden mentioned, referencing President-elect Donald Trump and his incoming administration.
Trump’s three conservative nominees to the Supreme Courtroom from his first time period as president voted to overturn a lady’s constitutional proper to an abortion. Democrats campaigned on reproductive rights and ladies’s well being points on this yr’s elections.
Karoline Leavitt, a spokesperson for Trump’s transition group, mentioned the president-elect will preserve his promise to enhance well being within the U.S.
“President Trump campaigned on making America healthy again for ALL Americans including men, women, and children, and he will deliver on that promise,” Leavitt mentioned in an e-mail.
Girls make up half of the U.S. inhabitants, about 168 million folks, however medical analysis into their distinctive well being circumstances has largely been underfunded and understudied, officers have mentioned.
Jill Biden has mentioned she introduced the thought for the White Home Initiative on Girls’s Well being Analysis to the president after Maria Shriver, herself a girls’s well being advocate and member of the influential Kennedy political household, introduced it to her.
The primary girl advised the researchers, advocates, and enterprise and philanthropic leaders attending the convention that she’s going to preserve urgent the problem after she leaves her position.
“My work doesn’t stop in January when Joe and I leave this house,” she mentioned. “I will keep building alliances, like the ones that brought us here today, and I will keep pushing for funding for innovative research.”
The primary girl mentioned the U.S. economic system loses about $1.8 billion in working time yearly due to how menopause impacts girls. And he or she is considering studying extra about excessive morning illness throughout being pregnant.
“I heard this a couple weeks ago and I was particularly interested because my own granddaughter was going through the same thing, ’cause we’re going to be great-grandparents,” Jill Biden mentioned.
Granddaughter Naomi Biden Neal and her husband, Peter Neal, predict their first little one.
Since its launch, the ladies’s well being analysis initiative has attracted almost $1 billion in federal funding, together with from the Protection Division and Nationwide Institutes of Well being.
“In one year, everybody in this room kicked butt,” Shriver mentioned on the convention. “Not until the Bidens did anyone ever think to make women’s health and research a priority for the federal government, so let that sink in.”
President Biden closed the convention with a nod to the affect of his spouse, who, after her remarks, sat within the entrance row beside their daughter Ashley Biden, who runs a girls’s shelter in Philadelphia.
‘You stepped up child,” Biden advised the primary girl. Then he advised the viewers, “In case you wonder, when she speaks, I listen.”
Initially Revealed:
