April 24, 2025—The Society for Women’s Health Research issued the following statement following a news article from Politico (*subscription required) announced that the administration plans to restore funding for the Women’s Health Initiative.
The Society for Women’s Health Research (SWHR) is delighted to hear that the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has made the decision to restore funding for the Women’s Health Initiative (WHI) Regional Center contracts. The WHI Regional Centers are essential for scientists’ efforts to conduct ongoing research and collect critical data that provide insights into the health of older women in the United States.
In its more than 30-year history, the WHI has generated invaluable learnings. Decimating its funding—which totals about $10 million per year—would have resulted in acute losses of knowledge generation on topics, such as cardiovascular disease, cancers, and osteoporotic fractures, which differently or uniquely affect women and cost the U.S. economy billions of dollars each year. It also would have hampered exploration into many other research areas related to health and aging, such as frailty, vision loss, dementia, mental health, and more.
We are grateful that the administration has recognized WHI’s value in contributing to our understanding of women’s health—a field in which we are already too far behind due to decades of exclusion of women’s participation in clinical trials, underfunding, and a lack of prioritization.
SWHR applauds the administration for taking the important step to restore funding for this landmark study and move us in the right direction to close the women’s health research gap.