August 25, 2026
Tonight: maternal mental health never made it into the bundle, Alabama sent 1,208 women to North Carolina, and more.
— Meghan McCarthy
MATERNAL MENTAL HEALTH: NATIONAL STAGE, STILL LEFT OUT
Perinatal mental health conditions affect as many as 1 in 5 women during pregnancy or the year after birth, making them more common than gestational diabetes. Yet screening remains far from universal. One reason may be structural: Obstetric providers are generally paid a single bundled rate for care from pregnancy through six weeks postpartum. Joy Burkhard, CEO of the advocacy group Policy Center for Maternal Mental Health, argues that the 30-year-old payment model discourages providers from addressing mental health because it was never included in the original bundle. The Lindsay Clancy trial and the death of Hayden Panettiere, who spoke publicly about postpartum depression, have pushed maternal mental health into the national conversation.
ALABAMA SENT FIVE WOMEN TO NORTH CAROLINA. THEN IT SENT 1,208.
North Carolina providers performed an average of nearly 38 more abortions for out-of-state patients each day in the year after Dobbs than in the year before it, while the number provided to state residents barely changed. A JAMA Network Open analysis covered all 79,433 abortions provided in the state during those two years. The number of patients arriving from Georgia jumped from 127 to 6,513; from Alabama, 5 to 1,208; and from Tennessee, 218 to 1,644. Out-of-state patients also traveled farther — an average of 258 miles, up from 156 — and arrived at a median of eight weeks’ gestation instead of seven. The timing of abortions among North Carolina residents didn’t change.
CONNECTICUT PUTS MENOPAUSE IN EMPLOYMENT LAW
Two new Connecticut laws treat menopause as both a workplace issue and a health care issue. One explicitly adds menopause-related impairment to the state’s workplace accommodation protections, requires employers to notify workers of those rights and directs the Commission on Human Rights and Opportunities to develop model policies. The other directs the state to create a clinician toolkit covering menopause diagnosis and both hormonal and nonhormonal treatments. A UConn initiative helped shape the laws with residents’ accounts of navigating menopause at work and in the health care system.
WOMEN’S HEALTH VENTURE FUNDING FELL BY MORE THAN A THIRD
Venture funding for women’s health companies dropped from $3.2 billion in 2024 to roughly $2 billion in 2025, while the companies’ share of all health care venture deals slid from 7.4% to 5.7%, according to a Silicon Valley Bank report. Biopharma startups were hit hardest, with funding falling from $1.3 billion to $610 million. SVB’s Megan Scheffel describes it as a higher bar rather than a disappearance of capital: “Progress that used to be the province of Series A is now required to raise a Seed round.” Some founders are also broadening their pitches beyond conditions exclusive to women to include depression, obesity and heart disease — conditions that affect both sexes but may affect women differently.
DIABETES CAN SET WOMEN AND MEN ON DIFFERENT PATHS
After a type 2 diabetes diagnosis, women were more likely than men to be diagnosed with anxiety, depression or a somatoform disorder — 8.1% versus 5.3% — while men were more likely to develop cardiovascular disease or kidney failure, 8.4% versus 5.3%. A PLOS Medicine study tracked 28,720 UK adults for a median of nearly seven years and found that younger women had the greatest probability of developing a mental health condition. The researchers recommend making routine mental health screening part of diabetes care, particularly for younger women.