Gone are the days of “When they go low, we go high.” That was Michelle Obama’s mantra during Hillary Clinton’s 2016 cage fight with Donald Trump. I wanted to believe it so much I had coffee mugs made with that saying on them. I don’t have them any more.

I’m trying to figure out what slogan I’d put on a coffee mug from Obama’s incendiary, incandescent Saturday night speech in Kalamazoo. I’m leaning toward “Take our lives seriously.” It was a 38-minute feminist manifesto, excoriating Trump but also the men who either support him or aren’t sure they’ll vote for our first Black female president. “A vote for him is a vote against us,” she declared. Obama laid out everything women suffer under while trying to just live our lives, from crippling double standards to menstrual cramps, the expectation of perfection, and sexual abuse. The pain and threat posed by even a “normal” pregnancy.

Oh, and menopause. I’ve attended hundreds of political speeches about women’s health over the years, but I’ve never heard menopause talked about from the stage. (We might whisper about it backstage.) But of all the stages of women’s health, menopause could be the most shrouded in mystery, even shame, and one of the most debilitating.

“Every month, far too many of us experience excruciating cramps and days of nausea,” she said. “As we struggle through menopause, crippling hot flashes, and depression, too many women my age are unaware of what’s happening to our bodies,” she added. (Obama opened up about her own menopause experience to People magazine in November 2022.)

“I want the men in the arena to bear with me on this, because there’s more at stake than just protecting a woman’s choice to give birth,” she said. “Sadly, we as women and girls have not been socialized to talk openly about our reproductive health. We’ve been taught instead to feel shame and to hide how our bodies work.”

Young girls might not know what to expect from puberty. Women “my age,” she noted, don’t know what to expect from menopause. Now, they face the erosion of their healthcare options, she said, in the wake of Dobbs, the Supreme Court’s abortion ruling that set the stage for bans across the country.

“Look, a woman’s body is complicated business, y’all,” Obama said, to a bit of laughter. “And in those terrifying moments when something goes wrong—which will happen at some point to the vast majority of women in this country—let me tell you, it feels like the floor falls out from under us. In those moments, all we have to rely on is our medical system, in those dark moments, all we have to rely on is our faith in a higher power and the experience of doctors to get us the care we need in a timely manner.”

Obama described the hideous new reality in so many states around the country, in which pregnant women can’t get the emergency care—which may include abortion care—that they need. “If your wife is shivering and bleeding on the operating room table during a routine delivery gone bad, her pressure dropping as she loses more and more blood, or some unforeseen infection spreads and her doctors aren’t sure if they can act, you will be the one praying that it’s not too late,” she told the men in the room. “You will be the one pleading for somebody, anybody, to do something. If we don’t get this election right, your wife, your daughter, your mother, we as women, will become collateral damage to your rage.”

She went on.

“Please, please, do not hand our fates over to the likes of Trump, who knows nothing about us, who has shown deep contempt for us, because a vote for him is a vote against us, against ourselves, against our worth. To think that the men that we love can be either unaware or indifferent to our plight is simply heartbreaking. It is a sad statement about our value as women in this world.”