Tonight: what an abortion ban did to mothers who weren't even pregnant, why lifting weights is a heart story, and more.
— Meghan McCarthy
p.s. Most of you knew how low HRT use is, at just 3.5%. But do you know what the Trump administration tried to burn? Scroll to find out.
FATHERS' MENTAL HEALTH DIDN'T MOVE. MOTHERS’ DID.
After Texas banned abortion in 2021, the share of mothers reporting fair or poor mental health nearly doubled, from 4.6% to 9.3%, far outpacing the rise in states without bans. The Harvard-led analysis of around 157,000 mothers found the effect held whether or not a woman was pregnant or seeking an abortion, and hit mothers on public insurance hardest. Fathers' mental health didn't budge. The authors can't prove cause, but point to a fraying reproductive health system: clinicians leaving, maternity care access shrinking, and reproductive autonomy reduced.
TWO HOURS OF LIFTING, 44% FEWER HEART ATTACKS
Women who did at least two hours of strength training a week had a 44% lower risk of heart attack and a 20% lower risk of major cardiovascular disease than women who did none, an American College of Cardiology journal analysis of around 117,000 nurses found. Each additional hour tracked with a further 14% drop in heart attack risk, and the benefit held even among women already meeting their aerobic exercise targets. The study is observational, but heart disease remains the leading killer of women, and resistance training is still the prevention tool most often left out of the conversation.
THE WOMEN ON HORMONE THERAPY ARE HEALTHIER. BUT THE HORMONES MIGHT NOT BE WHY.
A survey of more than 10,000 women found that menopausal women on hormone therapy ate more produce, slept better, and were likelier to strength train than women who'd never used it. But the study's own society medical director, Stephanie Faubion, says the explanation is mostly "healthy-user bias": women who choose hormone therapy tend to be more proactive about their health to begin with, with greater access to care and more resources. It's the same confound that made early hormone studies look heart-protective before randomized trials said otherwise.
PREECLAMPSIA'S WARNING DOESN'T END AT DELIVERY
Women who had preeclampsia with moderate to severe protein in their urine were about five times as likely to develop chronic kidney disease within a decade as those with little or none, roughly 1 in 20 versus 1 in 100, a Danish population study found. They also had higher rates of lasting high blood pressure. The only cure for preeclampsia is delivery, and monitoring typically stops at delivery, right when the long-term risk is just beginning.
A HISTORY OF THE FEMALE BODY, WRITTEN IN THE MARGINS
In "Presence," historian Erin Maglaque reconstructs what it felt like to inhabit a woman's body in Europe from 1500 to 1800: beauty ideals that swung from fertility to restraint, pregnancy cravings believed to shape the fetus, and "greensickness," the period's name for teenage longing with nowhere to go. Her problem is the archive itself, which preserved almost nothing of women's interior lives. Much of what the modern West treats as natural about the female body, the review argues, was invented in those centuries.