Content Warning: This article contains a brief mention of fictional sexual assault.
There’s an early scene in The Handmaid’s Tale that I almost couldn’t finish watching. June lies on an exam table, separated from the doctor by a sheet, while he examines her like she’s a piece of equipment. Then, he leans in and offers to get her pregnant himself, because a Handmaid who can’t conceive won’t be kept around for long. He frames it as helping her. But the scene leaves you with two uncomfortable truths: June doesn’t have a say over her own body, and this man believes he has a right to it.
I wanted to turn it off. I also couldn’t look away. And I kept thinking about one question: who gets to decide what “women’s health” actually means?
In Gilead, the answer is simple: a woman’s health matters because of what her body can produce. Handmaids are fed, exercised, and examined with care, but only so they can have babies. Gilead even rewrites medical facts to fit that goal. Officially, there’s no such thing as a sterile man, only women who are fertile and women who are failing.
Obviously, we don’t live in Gilead. But watching the show made me pay closer attention when “women’s health” showed up in the news this month.
On October 19, President Trump signed an executive order creating a new Women’s Health Division at the National Institutes of Health, along with a White House task force led by HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and chief of staff Susie Wiles. The initiative, championed by First Lady Melania Trump, promises more research into conditions like menopause, endometriosis, and heart disease. Those are real gaps in women’s health care, and supporters say it’s overdue attention.
Critics point out what the order leaves out. It doesn’t commit any specific funding. It doesn’t address contraception or abortion access. And it comes a year after the 2025 One Big Beautiful Bill Act cut Medicaid, a program which millions of women rely on for birth control and prenatal care, and cut off federal funding for Planned Parenthood clinics.
So which of these is “women’s health”? Research into menopause? Access to birth control? Both? The answer depends on who’s doing the deciding.
For college students, this isn’t abstract. One CU student and Colorado native told me she gets the pill through her insurance and has never had to think much about it, until she did. When her parents switched insurance plans, she went without coverage for a while and had to pay $50 out of pocket.
If her coverage ever stopped for good? “I would freak out,” she said.
Her experiences haven’t always been easy. When she had serious side effects from birth control, she struggled to get a doctor’s appointment, and the doctor she finally saw was so dismissive that she had to ask her mom to step in. Watching June on that exam table, I thought about how often women still have to fight just to be taken seriously by the people treating them.
Here in Colorado, the “who decides” debate played out in real time. After the One Big Beautiful Bill Act cut Medicaid payments to Planned Parenthood, clinics in our state stopped seeing Medicaid patients. Then, Colorado lawmakers voted to cover those costs with state money, the first state to do so. Supporters called it protecting access to basic care. Opponents said the state couldn’t afford it during a budget shortfall, and that other community clinics could fill the gap.
Whichever side you land on, the point is the same: what counts as women’s health, and who can get it, depends on who’s making the decision and where you live. A student at CU might have different options than a student a few states away.
The Handmaid’s Tale is fiction, and it’s meant to be extreme. But its power comes from showing what happens when women’s health is defined entirely by someone else’s goals. In Gilead, June’s body is cared for, monitored, and protected, and none of it is for her.
In real life, the decisions are messier and the people making them disagree. One government funds research, another funds clinics, and insurance decides the rest. Most of us only notice when something we counted on suddenly isn’t there.
So here’s my challenge: pay attention to who’s deciding. Know where your care comes from, who pays for it, and what would happen if that changed. Because the first step to having a say in your own health is knowing that someone is already making choices about it.