Jill Biden Highlights Women’s Health and Cancer Efforts in UAE Visit
Dr. Jill Biden stopped in the United Arab Emirates, a key US regional ally, on Thursday for the second leg of her last foreign solo trip as first lady, where she raised awareness for women’s health issues and commended cancer treatment initiatives during a tour of the Gulf monarchy’s burgeoning capital.
Biden, 73, began the six-day, four-country trip on Tuesday, traveling first to her family’s ancestral hometown in Sicily before arriving in Abu Dhabi late Wednesday.
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The outgoing first lady met with Sheikha Fatima bint Mubarak Al Ketbi, the emirate’s current queen dowager and queen mother, at the historic Qasr Al Bahra palace to kick off the visit. Sheikha Fatima is the mother of the UAE’s current president and the wife of the country’s late founder and first ruler.
The UAE is a federation of seven sheikdoms governed as an elected monarchy, overseen by a president and vice president selected by the seven royal families. Despite the nominal division of political power between the two positions, the ruler of Abu Dhabi holds de facto political authority.
At the Cleveland Clinic Abu Dhabi, Biden, joined by her daughter Ashley, met doctors to discuss cancer research, sharing her personal experience of losing her son, Beau Biden, to brain cancer in 2015, while later Biden spoke at a summit, where she stressed the importance of addressing women’s health, noting, “Women deserve answers about their health… for too long, medical research has focused primarily on men.”
Biden will stop next in Qatar before ending the trip in Paris alongside her husband and President-elect Donald Trump and other international dignitaries for the reopening of Notre Dame Cathedral.
