The Founding of the International Women’s Blood Clot Advocates (IWBCA)

Born from survival and sustained by purpose, the International Women’s Blood Clot Advocates (IWBCA) emerged from a couple’s harrowing encounters with venous thromboembolism to confront systemic failures in women’s vascular care. What began with a near-fatal double saddle pulmonary embolism and a later postpartum deep vein thrombosis evolved into a global advocacy initiative grounded in data, ethics, and prevention. Guided by academic training in health sciences and public health leadership, the founders built an organization that transforms lived experience into evidence-based reform, demanding a medical system in which women’s symptoms are recognized, their risks are measured, and their lives are no longer collateral damage to institutional neglect.

The International Women’s Blood Clot Alliance (IWBCA) was co-founded by a husband and wife following their shared confrontation with the life-threatening realities of venous thromboembolism (VTE). The founder’s first clotting event—a double saddle pulmonary embolism in 2019—nearly ended her life and exposed a systemic pattern of how women’s vascular symptoms are often dismissed, minimized, or misattributed. Despite clear clinical warning signs, her condition went unrecognized until the moment it became catastrophic. Six years later, six weeks after the birth of their daughter in 2025, she developed a second, severe deep vein thrombosis (DVT). That recurrence forced both to face an inescapable truth: the silence surrounding thrombosis is structural. Medicine’s failure to see, record, and respond to blood clots as a unified disease process continues to cost women their lives.

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