Cynthia L Elliott
3x Best-Selling Author, Inspirational Speaker, & Cultural Futurist
I still remember the stitches.
More than a hundred of them, running between my legs after the birth of my son. I was barely two weeks postpartum, still leaking, still learning how to nurse a tiny human who needed me every hour, and I was already back on the road. Four-plus hours of commuting a day to NYC. Pumping milk on the road while my newborn son was already in daycare. I was exhausted. Raw. Alone.
Little did I know in the photo above, taken while I was secretly pregnant, that the fashion house I gave my lifeblood to was about to behave horribly. I had negotiated a four-month work-from-home contract for the pregnancy. The company I worked with had agreed. I was their top performer, the one who had helped put them back on the international map.
Yet the moment the baby arrived, the agreement evaporated. They demanded I return. They forced me to place my weeks-old son in daycare so I could keep producing for them. My then-husband offered no help. In fact, he was the definition of abusive. I had no family and no support. Instead of care, I received judgment from both men and women, pressure, and a steady erosion of my spirit that left me teetering on the edge of a full nervous breakdown. I was the bread winner and had no choice.
They took my time with my child. They treated my healing body and my new motherhood as an inconvenience. I was the woman who had delivered for them, and still they treated me as disposable the second my body and mind needed recovery.
I have never forgotten that feeling, the particular loneliness of being a new mother whose pain and needs are treated as a nuisance rather than a human reality.
It is one of the reasons I know, bone-deep, how atrocious women’s health remains in America. And it is one of the reasons I founded the Her Health Summit.
Hayden Panettiere spoke publicly about her postpartum depression after a near-catastrophic birth and the arrival of her daughter. She described the uncontrollable darkness, the pain, the way it felt nothing like the mother she had promised herself she would be. For telling that truth on live television, the beauty brand that had featured her for a decade moved to end the relationship under a morality clause. MORALITY! Her team pushed back. The immediate firing was blocked. The partnership still ended. Years later, after her death this past weekend, the story has resurfaced and the public is rightly furious.
Lindsay Clancy, a nurse and mother of three, repeatedly reached for help as her mental health deteriorated after the birth of her youngest. She reported insomnia, crushing depression, suicidal thoughts, and later the terrifying command hallucinations of postpartum psychosis. The system she turned to prescribed, adjusted, and released her without fully recognizing or containing the emergency unfolding. We all know what they say happened. Her trial is unfolding now. The defense argues she was in the grip of a rare but devastating postpartum psychosis that went inadequately treated. The prosecution disputes that claim. What is not in dispute is that a mother who asked for help still ended in irreversible tragedy.
These two stories, one of professional punishment for speaking, one of catastrophic failure after pleading, are not outliers. They are symptoms of a larger truth: America still treats women’s bodies and minds, especially around pregnancy, birth, and hormonal change, as second-class concerns.
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The numbers are brutal.
The United States has the highest maternal mortality rate among high-income nations. Black women die at three times the rate of White women. The majority of these deaths are preventable.
Mental health conditions rank among the leading causes of pregnancy-related death, particularly in the year after birth.
Roughly one in five mothers experiences a maternal mental health condition. Postpartum psychosis, though rarer, is a psychiatric emergency that can include hallucinations and loss of reality, and it is still too often missed.
Research into women’s health receives a small and declining fraction of major funding. Pain is dismissed. Symptoms are labeled “anxiety” or “hormones.”
Women wait longer, are believed less, and are blamed more.
Less than 4% of research funding is spent on women over 40. If that doesn’t tell you they don’t care to solve the problem, nothing will. They only care about us when we can give birth and after the birth - you are not as useful so your challenges are unimportant.
We are gaslit. We are judged. When the hormonal storms of pregnancy, postpartum, or menopause bring depression, anxiety, rage, or psychosis, those very symptoms are frequently used against us, in workplaces, in courtrooms, in the court of public opinion, and inside our own families.
I lived a quieter version of that judgment. Many of you have lived your own. The fashion house that demanded I abandon my newborn so I could keep performing for them is not unique. The husband who did nothing is not unique. The absence of family support is not unique. The near-breakdown is not unique.
What will change this is not polite requests or waiting for institutions to grow a conscience. If the people who have held the majority of power and resources truly prioritized women’s health as life-and-death rather than a nuisance, the data would look different by now. It does not. So the only reliable path forward is organized, sustained demand from women ourselves.
That is why I created HerHealthSummit.com. It is not another wellness event that papers over the structural failures. It is a gathering place for truth-telling, for practical solutions, for accountability, and for the collective will to stop accepting second-class status for our bodies and minds.
The Summit exists because individual stories, mine, Hayden’s, and the millions that never make headlines, must become a force that institutions can no longer ignore.
Delighted to share that the SoulTech with Cynthia YouTube channel has hit 25,000 subscribers! We celebrated with a new episode sharing my predictions for the coming years. Listen on Apple, Spotify & YouTube.
The future of women’s health will not be gifted to us. It will be claimed by women who refuse to stay silent, who refuse to accept that our healing is optional, and who organize so that the next mother with a hundred stitches and a newborn is met with support instead of an impossible commute and a moral judgment. By the men who are our allies.
We already know what is broken. The question is whether we will keep absorbing the cost in isolation, or whether we will stand together and make the cost of continuing this way higher than the cost of finally changing it.
I am choosing the second path. I hope you will too.
With love and fire,
Cynthia
3x Best-Selling author, Cynthia L. Elliott, is the founder of the SoulTech Foundation, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit dedicated to teaching humanity how to upgrade their unique human capabilities to thrive in the age of AI.
