Jill Biden in RTP: Heart attacks and other women's health issues need more research
First lady Jill Biden visited Research Triangle Park Wednesday to discuss the Biden administration's effort to prioritize research and funding for women's health, saying health issues affecting women, including osteoporosis, menopause and heart disease, need more scrutiny.
"So many of us and so many of the women in our lives suffer from health conditions for which we don't have answers or solutions," Biden said during remarks at coworking nonprofit Frontier RTP. "We simply don't know about how to prevent, detect and treat the conditions that only affect women, affect women more than men, or affect women differently than men."
The symptoms of a heart attack look different in women than in men, she said, and are often unrecognized even though heart attack is a leading cause of death for women.
Biden also discussed an executive order signed by her husband earlier this week. President Joe Biden, a Democrat who's running for reelection this year, launched the White House Initiative on Women's Health Research, pointing to a historic lack of funding for women's health issues.
The executive order increases funding to improve research and data collection across a variety of government agencies and calls for unmet needs to be addressed, including new research on women's midlife health, including conditions such as menopause, arthritis, heart attack and osteoporosis.
The first lady said Joe Biden is making women's health research a top priority in the White House. She said she came to RTP because it is a strong hub for research development.
"Together we can write a new future for healthcare, where women leave doctors office's with more answers than questions, where no woman or girl has to hear that it's all in your head or it's just stress," she said.
Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper discussed his own administration's efforts to improve women's healthcare at the event, calling for paid parental leave and efforts to make it easier for women to work while pregnant. Cooper signed an executive order in 2019 that expanded paid parental leave options for state employees.
The first lady's visit on Wednesday comes less than a month after a visit from Vice President Kamala Harris, and a week ahead of a fundraiser for the Biden-Harris reelection campaign, where tickets are selling for as much as $100,000 apiece.
North Carolina figures to yet again be a key swing state in the presidential election — but that's far from the only key race on the ballot. Democrats are also hoping to keep control of the governor's mansion and break the GOP's veto-proof supermajority in the state legislature, while Republicans are hoping to flip important, Democrat-held offices such as governor and attorney general. The Biden campaign is expected to focus heavily on North Carolina in the coming months, as is the campaign of presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump.
Trump leads Biden 50% to 45% among all likely voters in North Carolina, according to a WRAL News poll released last week. The gender gap between the two candidates is sizable: Trump had a 14-point lead among men, while Biden had a 4-point lead among women.
One possible silver lining for Biden in those numbers: Women indicated they were more likely to vote than men this year.
The poll of 598 likely North Carolina voters, conducted in partnership with SurveyUSA between March 3 and March 9, has a credibility interval of 4.9 percentage points. A credibility interval is similar to margin of error but takes into account more factors and is considered by some pollsters to be a more accurate measurement of statistical certainty.
On candidate issues, the biggest two concerns for voters statewide were health care and the economy, according to the poll. The same was true of women specifically: When asked to rate their interest in a number of different issues on a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being the most pressing, 43% of women rated the economy 10-out-of-10 and 42% said the same of health care. Health care was far less of a concern for male voters, who showed more urgency on immigration.
Among specific health care issues, 26% of women also indicated mental health was a top concern for them. And 35% listed abortion as a top concern — nearly twice as much as much as male voters, only 18% of whom expressed the highest urgency about what the elections might mean for abortion laws going forward.
While very few voters of either gender said they're still undecided on who to vote for in the presidential race, women were more than twice as likely as men to say they hadn't yet made up their mind for governor. One in every five female voters remain undecided in the race between GOP nominee Mark Robinson and Democratic nominee Josh Stein. Cooper is term-limited and can't run for a third straight term as governor.
