Why do women go through menopause? It’s a question that I’ve been asking myself alot lately as I go through my own transition: if so many of us end up needing HRT just to replace the estrogen we lose, why does the body take it away in the first place?

In conversations with friends, and noticing the changes in my own body (the belly fat that showed up out of nowhere, the muscle mass that used to come back so easily and now doesn’t), the same question kept nagging at me. If we so often need to put estrogen back, why did our biology take it out to begin with? A body doesn’t usually undo something it still needs, not without a reason.

The obvious assumption is the tidy one: women just didn’t used to live long enough for menopause to matter, so nature never bothered to plan around it. It sounds reasonable enough. It’s also wrong. Here’s what I found instead, and it changed how I think about my own body in my 60s. It might change how you think about yours.

The Assumption Hiding in the Numbers

Look at a historical life expectancy chart and you’ll see numbers like 38, 40, 47 years old. Perhaps there was an assumption that women simply died before menopause even began, so it barely mattered as a life stage.

But that’s not what those numbers actually show. Hunter-gatherer women who made it to adulthood routinely lived into their 60s, 70s, even 80s. Queen Elizabeth I lived to 69, in an era when average life expectancy was under 40.

Women weren’t dying around the time menopause hit. They were living decades past it. So if that’s not the reason menopause exists, what is?

Why Do Women Go Through Menopause At All?

Here’s what makes menopause genuinely strange: almost nothing else in nature does this. Elephants, gorillas, nearly every mammal on the planet keeps reproducing until close to the end of its life. Fertility just tapers off quietly, along with everything else.

Human females don’t work that way. Our fertility ends decades before our bodies do.

This isn’t a design flaw so much as a redirect. The leading theory, though debated, is called the grandmother hypothesis, which says it became more valuable for an older woman to stop having her own babies and pour everything into the children and grandchildren already here. Researchers studying historical populations found exactly this: communities with more post-reproductive women had lower death rates among the younger women giving birth.

What Whales Taught Scientists

Out of more than 6,000 mammal species alive today, only a handful are known to go through menopause: humans, and five species of toothed whale: orcas, short-finned pilot whales, false killer whales, belugas, and narwhals. That’s the entire club.

Female orcas stay with their sons and daughters for life, so as she ages, she’s surrounded by more and more of her own children and grandchildren, the exact setup the grandmother hypothesis predicts in us. Evolution reached for the same answer twice, independently, in two completely different species built around tight, multigenerational family.

Why It Still Feels So Hard

If menopause is this old and this intentional, why does it feel like your body has turned on you, and why do so many of us end up needing HRT just to feel steady again?

Because the world it was built for barely exists anymore. For most of human history, a woman moving through menopause was surrounded by a household of women sharing the load. Today most of you are doing this solo: working full-time, raising kids or caring for aging parents, without the built-in village your biology is quietly expecting to be there.

The flaw was never in you. It’s a gap in your environment. HRT, movement, nutrition, stress regulation, the right supplements: all of it is filling in what your grandmothers had by default, not fixing something broken in you.

The Real Answer to “Why Do Women Go Through Menopause?”

Your body isn’t malfunctioning. It’s doing exactly what women’s bodies have done for a very long time, living well past the point where their mothers and grandmothers stopped having children too. What’s missing isn’t something wrong with you. It’s the support that used to come built in, and that’s what I spend my days helping women rebuild.