July 17, 2026
Tonight: The sad conclusion to the Trump administration’s $10 million contraceptive saga, the acting AG comes for the abortion pill, and more.
— Meghan McCarthy
p.s. More predictions await your wise responses…we’ll share the top answers on Sunday.
p.p.s. Due to an email glitch, this is coming on a Friday. TGIF!
INSIDE THE PLAN TO DESTROY $10 MILLION IN CONTRACEPTIVES
Internal State Department emails, released after a Freedom of Information Act suit by the Center for Reproductive Rights, show diplomats scrambling as the Trump administration moved to destroy $9.7 million in USAID contraceptives and HIV-prevention drugs sitting in a Belgian warehouse and bound for some of the world's poorest countries. "There is no one here that knows definitively what is in the warehouse," one embassy official wrote to Washington. The majority of goods were “not stored in a temperature-controlled environment, they were no longer considered safe for use by health care authorities. The U.S. government has spent more than $400,000 on the storage and transportation of the goods, the inspector general estimated.”
THE ACTING AG WANTS THE ABORTION PILL OUT OF THE MAIL
Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche told Republican senators on Wednesday that he would prioritize stopping mifepristone from being sent through the mail if confirmed to be the nation’s top lawyer, though he declined to say how. The Trump administration opposes the Biden-era rule allowing the abortion pill to be mailed, and Blanche suggested the Justice Department could review it. Medication abortion is now the most common way pregnancies are ended in the U.S., which is exactly why it has become the movement's central target.
ENDOMETRIOSIS ISN'T ONE DISEASE. IT COULD BE FOUR.
Researchers mining the All of Us database of more than 22,000 women with endometriosis identified four distinct symptom clusters that reach well beyond pelvic pain. They include gastrointestinal issues, migraines, anxiety, and depression. The condition affects roughly one in ten women of reproductive age and still takes four to eleven years to diagnose. Women who also had adenomyosis showed markedly more severe disease. Sorting patients into subtypes could be the first real step toward treating endometriosis as something other than a single catch-all diagnosis.
ONE IN THREE WOMEN CAN'T TELL IF THEY'RE IN PERIMENOPAUSE
A survey of more than 7,600 U.S. women found that 34% weren't sure whether they had entered perimenopause, a share that climbed to 42% among women aged 40 to 44, according to a study in Menopause. The confusion is structural: there is no lab test for perimenopause, the symptoms shift over years, and they overlap with everything from thyroid disease to depression. This is one of the largest surveys conducted on this topic, finding once again that women lack adequate education. Roughly two million American women enter the transition each year and stay in it for four to eight years, often without a name for what's happening to them.
WOMEN'S HEALTH JUST HAD ITS BIGGEST FUNDING YEAR EVER
Women's health companies raised a record $1.55 billion in equity across 164 rounds in 2025, with 85 companies closing deals, the highest single-year count on record, per a W Group report. The more telling shift is that the money stopped pooling at the very top, spreading across 15 categories and more than 30 countries. The catch is a Series A bottleneck leaving promising seed-stage startups stranded, which the report calls the ecosystem's highest-leverage problem to fix in 2026.