Greetings, Meteor readers,

And an especially warm hello to Breanna Stewart, who last night hoisted the New York Liberty onto her back and carried them to a 2-1 lead in the finals by dropping 30 points on the board. This is our year!

In today’s newsletter, we learn about the latest attack on mifepristone, the abortion pill. Plus, a new documentary out today is helping to push us down the road to understanding menopause. And we’ve got your must-reads for the weekend ahead.

Glory at the end,

Shannon Melero

WHAT’S GOING ON

The “zombie law” that won’t die: Yesterday, Abortion, Every Day founder Jessica Valenti broke the news that the Attorneys General of Kansas, Missouri, and Idaho had quietly filed a lawsuit against the FDA attempting to severely restrict access to mifepristone, one of the two medications used to induce abortions. Using an 1873 “zombie law” called the Comstock Act, the suit seeks to ban (among other things) the shipping of abortion medication—which nearly 20% of people who get abortions rely on. If successful, the ruling would apply across the country, including in pro-choice states.

If all this sounds familiar, it’s because anti-abortion activists have tried this before. In fact, this most recent suit was filed with Trump-nominated Texas judge Matthew Kacsmaryk, who ruled in favor of the previous mifepristone lawsuit before it was tossed out by the Supreme Court back in June. We knew this was coming; after the Supreme Court ruled that the previous plaintiffs did not have the proper standing to challenge the FDA, the only thing left to do for conservatives was to find new plaintiffs. Now, here they are.

The timing of this lawsuit is perplexing, given that abortion restriction is a losing issue at the ballot box, and this is bound to make anyone who cares about it furious. Perhaps that’s why, as Valenti points out, none of the AGs involved in the suit have put out a press release. But make no mistake: Despite recent attempts at moderation, this is the GOP attempting a national ban.

  AND:

• Yesterday, Nebraska’s Supreme Court ruled against state officials trying to block felons who’d completed their sentences from registering to vote. In April, the mandatory two-year waiting period that former felons who’d served their sentences had to sit out before voting was eliminated thanks to a bipartisan bill (LB 20). But before the bill went into effect, Nebraska’s state secretary ordered officials to stop registering former felons on the grounds that LB 20 was unconstitutional. The latest ruling cuts it very close: Those interested have a little over a week to have their voting rights restored. (If you want to learn more about the ins and outs of voting rights for the formerly incarcerated, listen to this episode of our podcast America, Who Hurt You? featuring Sheena Meade.)

• The Archdiocese of Los Angeles has agreed to pay an $880 million settlement to a group of 1,353 people who claim they were sexually abused as children by clergymen in the Catholic Church. According to the New York Times, this is the largest single payout by a diocese in the Church’s history.

• On Tuesday, the NWSL announced its newest expansion team, BOS Nation FC, a terrible name for what will be Boston’s women’s soccer team. And while many complained about the name, even more complained about the team’s marketing campaign. “There are too many balls in this town,” their slogan proclaimed. “We are BOS Nation, where anything is possible. No balls necessary.” (Yes. It’s a testicle joke.) Yesterday, the team apologized for what fans and Seattle midfielder Quinn referred to as transphobic marketing.

• The best thing about Thursdays? A brand new episode of UNDISTRACTED. This week, Brittany Packnett Cunningham talks to Drew Dixon about how she survived abuse in the music industry and the Diddy of it all.

How Much Do You Know About Menopause?

BY VIVIAN MANNING-SCHAFFEL

A new documentary might teach you things your own doctor won’t.

(VIA INSTAGRAM) 

The migraines, joint pain, night sweats, and brain fog began in my mid-forties. With two young children to keep up with, there wasn’t enough coffee in the world to make me feel present. I had an inkling I might be perimenopausal, but no one—not even my OB/GYN at the time—sat me down and told me what I was experiencing was normal, let alone offered me treatment options.

I, for one, would have greatly appreciated it if the new documentary The M Factor: Shredding the Silence on Menopause had come out a decade ago when my hormonal shenanigans began. Produced by Tamsen Fadal and Denise Pines, it’s airing tonight on PBS, right in time for World Menopause Day tomorrow. It’s the first menopause film to earn medical accreditation, meaning doctors and nurses can earn credits just by watching it. (Which is a good thing, since many of them don’t actually get taught this stuff in medical school.)

In 2025, more than one billion women worldwide will be in menopause, after a five-to-ten-year period of symptoms ranging from hot flashes and mood swings to vaginal dryness and heart palpitations. Yet even though menopause is as natural as puberty or childbirth, it has long been criminally neglected, under-researched, misdiagnosed, and mistreated. Too many women are blindsided by symptoms, gaslit or dismissed by their doctors, and end up feeling like they’re going insane.

Building on a recent wave of menopause journalism, the documentary fills in some of these gaps, explaining the experience from a medical, emotional, cultural, and historical perspective. In the absence of widespread guidance, some of the doctors featured have become revered social media heroes. Dr. Lisa Mosconi, a neuroscientist and author of The Menopause Brain, regularly shares her work with her hundreds of thousands of Instagram followers—including her major study linking estrogen to cognitive function and establishing Hormone Replacement Therapy as the gold standard of menopause treatment.

It took a while to get to that gold standard: The documentary takes us through the devastating impact of the flawed-as-hell 2002 Women’s Health Initiative study, which found that HRT increased the risk of blood clots and breast cancer, even though many subjects were well into their seventies and at high risk for those conditions anyway. After that study came out, many doctors stopped prescribing HRT, and what little menopause education there was in the U.S. basically ceased, says Mary Jane Minkin, MD, a clinical professor of obstetrics, gynecology, and reproductive sciences at Yale School of Medicine who appears in the documentary. More than 20 years later, she told me, a study led by a colleague of hers proved that less than a third of the OB/GYN residents surveyed were taught a menopause curriculum.

Fortunately, a far more inclusive, age-appropriate, longitudinal study about women in midlife called the Study of Women’s Health Across the Nation eventually disproved the 2002 study, restoring the credibility of HRT (and helping bring about the treatment’s current popularity). For me, it took several years of complaining, writing an article about the efficacy of HRT, and a series of tests to convince my OB/GYN to give me a prescription. Now that my sleep has largely been restored, my joints feel better, and my brain fog has cleared, I mourn the years I struggled through symptoms for absolutely no reason.

The documentary takes care to note that menopause isn’t a one-size-fits-all experience. The severity and length of symptoms can vary greatly depending on who you are; they can last an average of 4.8 years for Japanese-American women and an average of 10.1 years for Black women. Systemic racism can play a part in one’s experience with menopause, the documentary explains: It delves into the dark history of inequities of gynecology, including how Black enslaved women’s bodies were experimented upon by American gynecologists and the fact that Black women still suffer adverse outcomes and maternal mortality at disproportionately high rates, often because they’re not listened to by their doctors.

Things seem to be slowly changing for the better: President Biden signed an executive order in March that allocates 12 billion dollars to women’s midlife research—something Minkin hopes will further inspire young medical students to follow in her footsteps. As she says in the documentary: “I try to trick my medical students into going into menopause research because I guarantee you there’s a Nobel prize for the person who can figure this out.”

And in the meantime, say many menopause experts, we shouldn’t be white-knuckling it. “The option should be, ‘I’m going to go, I’m going to get this addressed,’ not ‘I’ll just suffer through and it’ll be over in a decade,’” says Sharon Malone, MD, another certified menopause practitioner, in the doc. “You’re doing far more harm than good by just not addressing what the issues are.”

WEEKEND READING 📚

On anti-abortion dogs: Investigative journalist Debbie Nathan reports out a tip about drug-sniffing police dogs in Jackson, MS, intercepting abortion pills in the mail. (The Intercept/Lux)

On Ozempic: The drug has been touted as a miracle for weight loss and glucose management. It’s even been held up as a tool for aiding in the climate crisis. But the full story is a lot more complicated. (Atmos)

On the small screen: The funniest and queer-friendliest vampires we’ve ever known are taking their final bow this month. How do we bid farewell to What We Do in the Shadows? (Vulture) 🦇

On music: What are the songs that define our decade? Luckily, someone made a list. (Hearing Things, a brand new website co-founded by beloved Meteor collective member Julianne Escobedo Shepherd 🥳)

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