Is RFK Jr. better on women's health than Newsom? We'll see

Governor vetoed a menopause treatment bill just weeks after the Trump administration removed warnings from hormone therapy drugs

- ANITA CHABRIA

ACTOR HALLE BERRY speaks at the 2025 New York Times Dealbook Summit.

It’s a bad look when Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is ahead of you on scientifically sound health policy — women’s health, to make matters worse — but that’s exactly what happened to Gov. Gavin Newsom last week.

Ouch.

In a Cabinet meeting, Kennedy went on a six-minute-plus grovel to Trump. That's pretty standard for these increasingly weird meetings, but the secretary of Health and Human Services specifically praised the president for ending a “20-year war on women by removing the black box warnings from hormone replacement therapy.”

As much as it shocks me to say it, RFK Jr. has a reasonable point.

A couple of days later, appearing onstage at the New York Times’ DealBook Summit, Oscar-winning actor Halle Berry took an unexpected and harsh shot at Newsom for vetoing a bill on menopause treatment.

“But that’s OK,” she said of Newsom killing the Menopause Care Equity Act (AB 432), which she had lobbied to pass and which had strong bipartisan support in the Legislature.

“Because he's not going to be governor forever, and with the way he has overlooked women, half the population, by devaluing us in midlife, he probably should not be our next president either,” Berry said. “Just saying.”

The two events show just how complicated and controversial menopause care has become in the past few years, as women not only talk about it more openly, but demand care that for, well, basically always, has been denied or denigrated as unnecessary.

Looking a bit deeper, this seemingly out-of-the-blue menopause moment gets to the heart of an insurance problem that, male or female, most Americans have an opinion on: How much power should insurance companies have to deny care that a doctor deems reasonable?