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While you’re on their site, explore their newly published blog article summarizing the latest scientific research on seed cycling and PCOS.

They’re also signing health affiliates — if you love your practitioner, please send them their way via their Work With Us page! And for reading recommendations and wellness tips, follow their on Instagram @twomoonshealth.

MyAdvo community news: How we’re growing our community
Founder health update: Finding & choosing a Doula
Women’s health in politics: RFK vs medicine
MyAdvo monthly reads

We've been testing different ways to bring more health warriors into MyAdvo!

Referrals from our amazing members have been incredible — shoutout to Jessi, Brenna, Nicole, Alexis, Paola, and Hayley for referring your friends with endometriosis, fibroids, PCOS, and adenomyosis to MyAdvo over the last month 🫶

Instagram has brought in great volume, though conversion takes a bit more work. We're also testing out engaging in Facebook groups... and well, let's just say we're learning that our natural orbit converts much better than cold engagement so far.

The biggest insight? Anyone already connected to our community (friends, colleagues, people in our networks) are so much easier to convert bc they already trust the recommendation.

If you know someone who could benefit from MyAdvo, we'd appreciate you referring them! Our health warriors power our community, and every single referred friend means the world!

Refer a friend to MyAdvo

In our members' WhatsApp chat, we have a few different channels so people can connect more deeply by condition and health stage like Pregnancy and Postpartum.

Here are a few highlights from our Endo, Fibroids, and Pregnancy & Postpartum chats this month:

If you do choose hysterectomy for fibroids, what does recovery/life post-surgery look like?
How to manage pregnancy insomnia?
What work accommodations have you requested for endometriosis?

Join the conversation by becoming a MyAdvo member.

As I enter my third trimester, I’d like to share my decision for hiring a birth doula. A doula is, “a trained professional who supports you before, during and after you’ve had a baby.” They are not medical professionals, so they cannot deliver your baby (this is different from midwives), and their range of services is customizable to offer physical and emotional support during pregnancy and the postpartum period. In fact, my birth doula is also a postpartum doula, and I’ve also hired her after our hospital stay to help my partner and I in the first weeks with our newborn.

Services a birth doula offers include:

Helping you put together a birth plan by discussing your childbirth preferences and expectations.
Preparing you mentally and emotionally for childbirth by recommending breathing exercises, relaxation techniques, and more.
Providing physical support during labor like posture and movement, coaching you through relaxation techniques and breathing exercises to manage pain, making sure you are drinking water and being taken care of at home or at the hospital.
Providing emotional support to you and your partner.
Advocating for your birthing preferences by communicating with your healthcare team, especially during labor.

As a first time mom (FTM), I’m pretty anxious about what to expect from labor pain and the unpredictability of childbirth. Having a professional who’s seen this so many times makes me feel reassured, especially because my family is far. I’ve spent enough time in hospitals to know how helpful it is to have someone in your corner, especially if you can’t advocate for yourself when in pain. The other consideration that really made me lean towards hiring a birth doula is the situation with my back. Due to my spinal fracture a couple years ago, my OB did share that she wants me to speak with the anesthesiologists about the placement of the epidural and setting expectations if it doesn’t work. The failure rate of epidurals for obstetrics is ~12% but a previous spinal surgery may increase that risk. If this becomes the case, I really want help from a doula through the full pain of labor!

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This was a head scratcher. I first started by googling NYC doulas and came across a lot of different websites. I signed up to get matched via the East River Doula Collective and Baby Caravan. I also thought of visiting doula certification websites like DONA but was overwhelmed with the list of names. Ultimately, I felt like I needed more curation to my research, so I started asking friends of friends (very similar to the start of MyAdvo!) Not many people had used a doula, but ultimately, a friend recommended that I reach out to her friend who was training to be a doula. She put me in touch with Carriage House Birth based in Brooklyn to get matched. I also asked my OB if she knew of any doulas with whom she enjoyed working with. It was via those two avenues that I interviewed a handful of doulas and ultimately chose the doula that my OB had recommended. I realized that was really important to me because it meant the doula was familiar with the hospital as well as my OB’s team.

Here are some of the questions I asked when interviewing doulas. Some of these are personal to my birth plan as well as personal preferences, and I found this template from DONA super helpful.

Where did you receive your training and from which organization?
What other certifications do you have (ie, lactation specialist)? → This was really important to me because I’d really like to try and breastfeed with my first!
How long have you been a certified doula? How many birthing parents have you supported?
What full-spectrum services do you offer? What overlaps with newborn care specialists (night nurse/baby nurse)?
What pain management techniques will you use to help me move through labor?
How will you support me if my epidural doesn’t work?
How will you support my partner through this process?
How will you interact with my medical team?
Will we meet for prenatal visits before the birth, and what is included in those visits?
When do you consider yourself "on call" 24/7 for my birth?
Will you come to my home when my labor starts or is your support only available after a certain point in the process?
Will we meet postpartum, and what is included in those visits?
Do you have a backup doula for times when you are not available? May we meet your backup?
What is your fee, and what does it include? Is there a deposit? → Doulas are unfortunately not covered by insurance. I’ve found NYC birth doula rates range from $3,500 to $5,000.

Join our Pregnancy & Postpartum channel for more doula recs!

I'm tired...and no, it's not just being pregnant.

There's something different about advocating for your health right now. Something that goes beyond the usual struggles of finding the right specialist, persuading a provider to listen to your symptoms, or getting insurance to cover treatment.

Typically, advocating for yourself is grounded in research you can leverage to make choices. As women, we're used to that research being limited, making it hard to understand what options exist. Usually, lack of choice comes from lack of research on women’s health or prohibitive costs, but many of us haven't experienced choice being limited by policy that dismisses established research in favor of ideology.

Instead of funding research, the current administration is eliminating choice altogether.

Advocating for your health now feels like chasing a moving target with a government systematically dismantling the infrastructure we rely on for care. From overriding medical experts’ evidence-based guidance for COVID vaccines to proposed slashing of NIH research funding—funding for the very studies we need to understand conditions like PCOS, endometriosis, and fibroids.

In my own appointments, I see my OB trying her best to advise me on questions like whether the COVID vaccine will be available this fall before I give birth. You can tell she doesn't want to be saying, "We'll have to see.”

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Under RFK Jr., the CDC removed COVID-19 vaccines from the list of shots recommended for healthy pregnant women and children. In the last week, leading medical groups including American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) and the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) broke with CDC recommendations to publicly push back.

ACOG recommends, “That patients receive an updated COVID-19 vaccine or “booster” at any point during pregnancy, when planning to become pregnant, in the postpartum period, or when lactating. [...] The data show that the COVID-19 vaccines are particularly effective at reducing morbidity from COVID-19 complications in pregnant patients and their infants…Importantly, vaccination during pregnancy provides passive immunity to the infant after birth, protecting them from COVID-19 in the first few months of life before they can be vaccinated.”

The AAP said, “All young children aged 6-23 months should receive a COVID-19 shot regardless of previous doses or SARS-CoV-2 infection.” In fact, “the rate of COVID-19 hospitalization for children under 2 years is the highest among pediatric age groups, and for children aged 6-23 months, it is comparable to people aged 50-64 years, AAP said, citing CDC data.”

These statements followed the Vaccine Integrity Project (VIP)’s data review, suggesting no new evidence that would prompt the changes to the changes in vaccine recommendations.

Right now, the FDA is about to sign off on the updated COVID vaccine that protects against the L.P.8.1 subvariant and is poised to limit the vaccine to only people over 65 years of age as well as those 6 months and older who have at least one medical condition. If you don’t fit these criteria, you may face eligibility checks, off-label prescriptions (many pharmacists can’t or won’t administer these based on their corporate policies or state laws), or out-of-pocket costs if insurance follows the narrower federal commendations.

This means many people who do want to be vaccinated won’t be able to access the COVID-19 vaccines.

Additionally, the FDA has signaled that it may not renew Pfizer’s pediatric authorization for children ages 6 months to 4 years old this fall. This would remove the only COVID-19 vaccine approved for all children in the U.S. as the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine is approved only for children with one or more health conditions and the Novavax vaccine is only for use in children ages 12 years and older.

It starts with RFK Jr.’s leadership of the Health and Human Services department, which controls the FDA and CDC. RFK Jr. has been part of the anti-vaccine movement and is a skeptic of mRNA vaccines (the technology teaches our cells how to make a harmless piece of the virus, so your immune system learns to recognize and fight the real thing without ever being infected), which is what allowed the COVID-19 vaccine to get to use so quickly. He recently called on the U.S. medical journal, Annals of Internal Medicine, to retract a large vaccine safety study that found no evidence that aluminum increases health risks for children. This study was funded by the Danish government and analyzed nationwide registry data for more than 1.2 million children over more than two decades.

Acting on his HHS power, RFK Jr. cleaned house:

February 2025: Eliminated long-standing transparency rules. He ended longstanding rules requiring public comment periods before policy changes, giving him authority to change policies in areas from Medicaid to NIH without advance notice
June 2025:
1. Dismissed the entire CDC vaccine advisory committee. All 17 members of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), the 61-year-old expert panel that has guided federal vaccine recommendations were removed
2. Replaced vaccine experts with skeptics, He handpicked 8 new members, including several who have expressed skepticism about vaccines, and notably included a critic of COVID vaccine.
July 2025: Threatened to dismiss primary care experts. Medical groups are concerned he may oust members of the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force, which focuses on primary care recommendations.
August 2025: Removed top medical organizations for Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP). Informed top medical organizations that they will no longer help with vaccination recommendations.

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This isn’t just vaccines, by the way. We’re seeing this with IVF as well. Conservatives are pushing for a “natural” alternative via Restorative Reproductive Medicine (RRM). RRM is already being passed into law in states like Arkansas that requires insurance companies to cover the alternative approach. This has come to the forefront of the highly anticipated IVF report from the administration.

Between a government dismantling expert-backed medical guidance, social media that promotes distrust of medicine, and doctors who remain rushed, we're left making decisions with incomplete evidence and way too much noise. So, if you're also swimming in opinions right now, know you're not alone. There are countless hypotheses, theories, and ancestral wisdom practices out there—but currently there's a neglect for science to actually explore these and develop them into evidence-based treatments (a.k.a repeatable and measurable results across a statistically significant amount of population). Instead of funding that research, the current administration is eliminating choice altogether. We're not getting more options; we're getting fewer, even for treatments with established evidence.

In this uncertain landscape, we can strive to hold complexity, acknowledging that perfect evidence doesn't always exist while still demanding rigor from those who claim to have answers. The core principles of health advocacy still matter, maybe more than ever: asking the right questions, seeking multiple perspectives from qualified sources, understanding what evidence exists (and what doesn't), and trusting your own experience while staying open to learning.