When AI Becomes Care: Governance Gaps in Women's Health Technologies
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.30953/thmt.v11.683Keywords:
AI governance, care infrastructure, health technologies, women’s healthAbstract
Women’s health apps are increasingly treated as care infrastructure. They track cycles, predict fertility, assess pregnancy risk, and shape decisions using AI-driven systems, often filling gaps left by a medical establishment that has long underinvested in women’s health.
At the same time, many of these tools operate with minimal AI governance and fragile privacy protections. Founders frequently point to HIPAA compliance as reassurance, even when their products fall outside its scope or rely on automated inference that compliance alone does not address.
This op-ed examines how women’s health technologies became substitutes for care, where governance breaks down in practice, and why AI governance now functions as women’s health policy in the United States. As legal and social conditions shift, the cost of weak governance is no longer abstract, and the people bearing that cost are rarely the ones building the products and systems.
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Copyright (c) 2026 Soribel Feliz
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
Authors retain copyright of their work, with first publication rights granted to Telehealth and Medicine Today (THMT).
THMT is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
