Halle Berry visits Capitol Hill to fight for women’s health

Halle Berry (Gage Skidmore, CC BY-SA 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons) by Ashleigh Fields, The Washington Informer Halle Berry, the first Black woman to win the Academy Award for Best Actress, recently visited Capitol Hill to advocate for women’s rights, particularly to raise awareness about menopause. “I’m standing up for myself. Because I know that when a woman stands up for herself she stands up for all women. And all women go through menopause,” Berry, a 57-year-old mother of two, said. Berry shared that menopause, when a woman’s ovaries stop producing eggs and releasing the necessary hormones for fertility, is one of the most unrecognized and understudied issues for women. “Society has told us when we get to be old we should just sort of putter away, we should fall off into obscurity and that our issues don’t matter. Well that’s just not true,” she continued. The Academy Award-winning actress stood alongside Sens. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) and Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) as they introduced the Advancing Menopause and Midlife Women’s Health Care Act. If passed, the legislation would garner an unprecedented $275 million toward research, care and acute treatment for menopause. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) would receive $25 million annually...