Rfk Jr.’s Department Is Revealing Its Thoughts About Women's Health

Republicans are hoping Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and the moms who find his Make America Healthy Again message appealing will narrow the Democrats’ edge among women voters in this year’s midterm elections.

Kennedy’s health department is honing its message — that a combination of mainstream and alternative health practices can enhance and extend women’s lives — at its inaugural National Conference on Women’s Health in Washington this week.

“We are here to bring women together and really focus in on conditions that are not always talked about,” Dorothy Fink, the deputy assistant secretary for women's health who’s overseeing the event, told POLITICO.

Among the subjects on the three-day agenda: longevity, fertility, menopause, hormone therapy, mental health, cancer and Lyme disease.

Researchers with decades of experience and grants from the National Institutes of Health are rubbing shoulders with a teen beauty queen and an advocate for homeless dogs who raises money at Mar-a-Lago. The Health and Human Services Department that Kennedy leads expects hundreds of participants at sessions that run from Wednesday evening till Friday.

Democrats have long been the choice of women voters for prioritizing research specific to women’s health and for making it easier for women to control when and how they have children by protecting abortion rights and access to contraception. Former President Joe Biden signed an executive order 2 years ago announcing new actions to improve women’s health research, ahead of that year’s presidential election. Kennedy, a former Democrat, has made inroads by telling women that powerful interests, food and pharmaceutical companies, and experts in those industries’ pockets, have misled them about what makes for a healthy life. Conference presenters are pitching diet and lifestyle changes Kennedy believes mainstream medicine has ignored.

Aides to President Donald Trump believe Kennedy and his MAHA moms will help Republicans retain control of Congress and have, therefore, been willing to embrace Kennedy’s broadsides against traditional Republican supporters in industry.

From allergy awareness advocate Tess Ferm, Miss America’s Teen 2026, to a score of Trump administration health officials, speakers at the conference will focus on a mix of mainstream women’s health concerns and MAHA-aligned topics. Among the mainstream topics: accelerating research into conditions affecting women’s health and improving survival rates among new mothers and their babies. The MAHA-themed panels and speakers will examine the microbiome, inflammation and chemicals in the environment that can cause chronic diseases in women.

The conference is “an opportunity to build those bridges between scientific knowledge and hard-earned, hard-replicated, rigorous science and those people who are influencing the public’s decision-making for their health,” said Roberta Brinton, who leads the Center for Innovation in Brain Science at the University of Arizona and will give a keynote speech Thursday about her work on the link between menopause and Alzheimer’s in women and what can be done about it.

Dietary supplement company founder Susan Heeren Malzoni, who’s hosted fundraisers for homeless dogs at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida, will give introductory remarks Thursday, followed by a keynote by Nancy Brown, the CEO of the American Heart Association. Kennedy in January accused the heart association of demonizing “good food,” such as red meat and whole milk, to serve the interests of ultraprocessed food companies, prompting a denial.

Dietitian Ella Davar, who founded the Global Longevity Association and hosted luncheons at Mar-a-Lago as recently as last weekend, will speak on a panel about making women stronger after cancer.

Biotech founder Piraye Beim, who’s worked on developing drugs for fertility, ovarian health and endometriosis and just sold her business to European pharma company Gedeon Richter, will be part of a panel looking at innovation in the private sector in the next decade. She’ll be speaking alongside Chris Curry, the clinical director of women’s health at smart ring company Oura, and Kate Ryder, the founder and CEO of Maven Clinic, a virtual clinic for women's and family health, among others.

Speakers Wednesday evening are discussing the Food and Drug Administration’s November decision to remove the black box warning for hormone replacement therapies used as treatment in menopause.

Black box warnings on drug packaging indicate the product could have severe side effects, and hormone replacement therapies, which contain estrogen to replace levels of the hormone that decline with age, have for two decades carried a warning of risks of cardiovascular disease, breast cancer and probable dementia. That warning came following a study involving women who were much older than the average age of women experiencing menopause and used a hormone formulation no longer in common use, the FDA said when it announced its decision to remove the warning.

FDA Commissioner Marty Makary is scheduled to speak at the conference Thursday. Other HHS officials on the agenda include Fink; Jay Bhattacharya, the National Institutes of Health director and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention acting director; Chris Klomp, HHS chief counselor and deputy administrator at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services; and Alicia Jackson, the director of the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health.

HHS announced in January that it was seeking conference sponsors, but it has not said so far who signed on.

Some of the conference topics will showcase the Trump administration’s approach to women’s health, stressing fertility and childbearing, combined with Kennedy’s MAHA agenda that promises women longer lives by focusing on the root causes of their conditions rather than just promoting medication to treat them.

Some speakers say they’re excited to see women’s health approached from these angles.

“For me as a family physician, when I do women’s health, it’s depression, it’s menopause, it’s heart health, it’s diabetes, it’s not just reproductive health,” said Marguerite Duane, who will speak at a session Thursday on chronic conditions and infertility.