Menopause has finally made it to Congress, which is impressive when you consider that women have been dealing with it for quite some time. On September 16, the Senate Special Committee on Aging held the first congressional hearing devoted to menopause. Senators gave it the rather perfect title, "Half the Country, Zero Hearings," and spent the afternoon discussing gaps in research, physician training and care.
There is something faintly absurd about the timing: menopause is one of the more predictable events in human biology and yet in 2026, Congress is still asking fairly fundamental questions about how the federal government studies it and how doctors are trained to treat it. Kirsten Gillibrand, a New York Democrat, and Rick Scott, a Florida Republican, followed the hearing with a bipartisan request for the Government Accountability Office to examine how federal agencies fund and coordinate menopause research and care. We’re still researching menopause?
Women have had it for…ever? Perhaps, that tells us something about the strange moment that the inescapable, inevitable biological stage has reached in America as public conversations about it have raced ahead (just land on the right algorithm and you’ll spend hours hearing about women’s takes on the topic) while medicine and government are only now trying to catch up. The hearing arrives alongside a broader congressional push.
Patty Murray, a Washington Democrat, and Lisa Murkowski, an Alaska Republican, reintroduced the Advancing Menopause Care and Mid-Life Women’s Health Act this year, a proposal that would authorize $275 million over five years for menopause and midlife health. The package would authorize $25 million annually for NIH research and innovation focused on menopause and midlife health, while also funding clinician training, public education and health programs. It would establish Centers of Excellence in Menopause and Mid-Life Women’s Health and seek better coordination of federal research.
For a sense of the existing research landscape, NIH estimates it spent $78 million on menopause research in fiscal 2025. In the same year, it reported $314 million for prostate cancer research and $768 million across its much broader "Men’s Health Research" category. Those figures can be misleading, so to note: NIH says its research categories overlap, and "men’s health" covers far more than a single condition or biological transition.
Still, the contrast is there: a bill proposing a dedicated $25 million-a-year research effort for menopause is arriving at a moment when NIH estimates its entire existing menopause research portfolio at less than one-quarter of what it spends on prostate cancer alone. Those provisions sound surprisingly foundational for a condition that is hardly new. And that, presumably, is the point.
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