Fourteenth International Conference on Health, Wellness & Society

Abstract

Approximately half the world’s population will transition into menopause during their 5th and 6th decades of life. Despite this inevitability and its impact on individuals, whether and how menopause might be a public, and thus a policy, concern have in some countries been relatively recent debates. We explore the menopause-related national policy discourses of two western industrialized nations, the United States and United Kingdom, over the past 40 years. In this paper, we discuss one of the earliest themes to emerge: menopause-related research. We find that the US Congress and UK Parliament both approached research into menopause as a medical question, which paralleled other questions about the historical inclusion of women in clinical research, overall. Other non-medical lines of inquiry, such as socioeconomic determinants and disparate outcomes of menopause across populations, were not emphasized in either nation. We discuss these findings in light of legislatively “medicalizing” a problem that can, indeed, present symptoms and risks that medicine informs, but which also raises non-clinical questions with implications for how societies organize themselves. Potential impacts for marginalized communities are considered in this paper.