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Honor & Remember... Her.

What Memorial Day Continues to Teach Me About Women's Health... and Who We've Lost

Memorial Day is not Veterans Day. That distinction matters.

Today is set aside not to celebrate those who served, but to grieve those who died in service… the women and men who gave everything, whose lives were cut short in uniform. As we close out Women’s Health Month this May, I find myself sitting with a question that doesn’t get asked often enough: What does it mean that women have died for this country, while this country has consistently underinvested in keeping women alive?

That is not a political statement. It is a clinical one.

The Women We Remember Today

Women have served, and died, in every American conflict, from the Civil War nurses who succumbed to the diseases they treated, to the more than 150 women killed in Iraq and Afghanistan. For much of that history, their deaths were undercounted, their sacrifices uncategorized, and their names harder to find on the monuments we visit today. The erasure of women from our military memory mirrors something that happens in medicine every single day: women’s bodies, women’s pain, and women’s lives are treated as secondary data.

The Parallel in Women’s Health
Heart disease remains the leading cause of death in women yet for decades, cardiac research was conducted almost exclusively on men. Autoimmune diseases, which disproportionately affect women, take an average of nearly five years to diagnose. Black women in the United States die from pregnancy-related complications at two to three times the rate of white women. These are not statistics. They are losses. They are the civilian version of leaving someone behind.
 
Women’s Health Month asks us to celebrate progress. Memorial Day asks us to reckon with cost. Held together, they invite a harder, more honest question: Who are we still losing — and why?
What Remembrance Requires of Us

Grief, when it is honest, moves toward action. Honoring the women who died in service means building a world where women’s lives, in and out of uniform, are treated as worth protecting before crisis strikes. That means earlier screening. It means culturally responsive, whole-person care. It means listening to women when they say something is wrong… the FIRST time.

As Women’s Health Month comes to a close, let this day be more than a long weekend. Let it be a moment of reckoning and a recommitment to the women still here, still fighting for their health, still deserving of our full attention.
 
In memory of every woman whose name we should know better.
 
Questions about your health? Submit them to Dr. White at [email protected] or book a consultation with Dr. White.