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A week marred by the reelection of known sexual abuser and abortion-rights antagonist Donald Trump for president took a much-needed turn toward community and organizing momentum at Los Angeles’s beloved bakery Gjusta on Monday. Cohosted by women’s health company Perelel Universe, alongside stylist and Period founder Karla Welch, and entrepreneur, author, and former doula Erica Chidi, the event served as a battle cry to encourage attendees to sign a petition calling on Congress to allocate more funding to the National Institutes of Health and close the gender health gap ahead of the 2025 budget deadline on December 20.
Los Angeles luminaries including Raven-Symoné, Abbi Jacobson, Zoe Lister-Jones, Judy Greer, and Eckhaus Latta co-creative director Zoe Latta mingled beneath a constellation of twinkle lights and heat lamps. Although the ramifications of a second Trump presidency on reproductive autonomy weren t far from anyone’s mind, Perelel cofounders Alex Taylor, Victoria Thain Gioia, and Dr. Banafsheh Bayati urged attendees to remember that the inequity built into our government’s approach toward researching and treating women’s health issues are unfortunately systemic and deep-rooted, regardless of who is occupying the White House at any given time.
“Four years ago, women’s health wasn’t even a hot topic on the table, and what’s incredibly important is that we have seen this groundswell of interest with what has happened in recent years, but as our reproductive autonomy continues to be stripped away, how empowering is it to equip women with knowledge of how our bodies work?” Taylor asked, with Gioia adding: “Four years ago, we weren’t talking about pregnancy loss as openly, or PCOS, or period pain, or menopause. Now we’re talking about it, and I hope that’s the start of the change.”
One of the night’s most resonant moments came when Chidi told a rapt audience that she had started her sexual and reproductive health information app LOOM shortly after Trump’s first election, asking attendees to organize, invest in their communities from the ground up, and center women’s health and reproductive rights under what she called the “canopy” of another Trump presidency (Perelel recently acquired the app). While hope and political optimism may be in short supply across the country right now, there was plenty of it to spare on a dimly lit restaurant patio.
Hopefully, the work of organizations like Perelel will make the ongoing fight for investment in women’s–health research a little bit easier to win. Still, in the meantime, at least we can come together in communion around the principle that every woman deserves unfettered access to vital and potentially life-saving information about her body.
