UN Headquarters, 18 March 2026
Your Excellencies,
Distinguished Speakers,
Delegates to the Commission on the Status of Women,
Dear Ladies and Gentlemen,
I would like to welcome you to this afternoon’s event on the theme of “Beyond band-aids: Innovation to improve women’s healthcare,” which the Permanent Observer Mission of the Holy See is co-sponsoring together with Fertility Education and Medical Management Foundation, normally referred to by its acronym FEMM.
Health is both an outcome of and an enabler for integral human development. It facilitates education, work, and participation in family and community life.
For that reason, the Holy See strongly supports efforts to realize the right to the highest attainable standard of health for everyone. We must recognize, however, that far too often women and girls lack access to medical care and have needs which are not met. This is due to a variety of factors, including discriminatory attitudes and social norms, lack of financial resources, or weak health systems.
Yet even when women do seek medical assistance, many doctors are unable to treat them. For decades, the field of medicine has made great leaps in preventing and treating disease, but oftentimes women were left behind.
This has occurred both in determinations of what is studied, with female health problems not given due consideration, and who is studied, with men and male models the norm for research and pharmaceutical testing, among other things.
Thankfully there have been significant efforts to correct this, but gaps persist.
One often-overlooked factor is the overreliance on hormonal contraceptives as a treatment. As we will hear from our panelists, contraception at best provides symptom management for endocrine disorders - a “band-aid” solution to much deeper problems.
For some, it also has harmful side effects, some of which impact long-term health. But for many doctors, it is all they have to offer. Sadly, contraception also has negative social effects: by turning women’s unique capacity for childbearing into a problem to be managed, it reinforces the same attitudes that led to underinvestment in women’s health.
This places the burden on women not to inconvenience others, particularly employers, with their fertility, when in reality we all have a shared responsibility to respect women and men equally in their distinctiveness.
Women deserve better.
Respecting the dignity of woman means accepting and valuing her at the level of her full humanity, including her fertility and capacity for motherhood. These are not problems to be solved, maladies to be remedied, or, worse, evils to be rejected, but rather ought to be embraced as part of the reverence owed to woman in accordance with her dignity.
By accepting woman in her fullness, medicine can also better serve women through accurately diagnosing and treating problems which are both too common and, sadly, too often dismissed and left untreated.
Our partner for today’s event, FEMM, assisted by its affiliated research organization Reproductive Health Research Institute (RHRI), has taken up the task of meeting women’s needs through holistic healthcare. Its fertility education programming provides women with the knowledge to understand their bodies, including the health-hormone connection, and identify signs both of health and of conditions that need to be addressed, empowering them to see care when needed and make informed choices about their health and fertility.
Its medical management side trains medical practitioners to diagnose and treat health conditions, including underlying issues involved in infertility, menopause, thyroid dysfunction, migraines, depression, weight gain, fatigue, pain, polycystic ovarian syndrome, and other complaints which may be common but are not healthy or normal.
And all of this is undergirded by cutting edge medical research into hormonal health.
I look forward to hearing more about this from our expert speakers and thank all of you for your interest in this important topic.
Thank you.
