Breast Cancer Awareness Month

Floor Speech

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Mrs. BROOKS of Indiana. Mr. Speaker, October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month, so it is fitting that I rise today in support of H.R. 4078, the EARLY Act Reauthorization, which passed the House earlier this week. I am honored to have co-led this bipartisan legislation with my good friend, colleague, and breast cancer survivor, Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz.

This is an important public health bill to ensure that young women throughout the United States understand the importance of breast health and the value of regular breast cancer screenings.

This bipartisan bill raises public awareness about breast health and educates healthcare providers to encourage early detection of breast cancer. It also supports initiatives and research to help identify high-risk women by collecting family histories and educating patients about early warning signs.

These programs are vitally important. We all know the statistics. One in eight women in the United States will be diagnosed with breast cancer over her lifetime, and many women with breast cancer typically have no symptoms.

This disease has taken far too many of our loved ones. In 2017, breast cancer was the number one most diagnosed cancer type in the United States and the number two most deadly.

Earlier this year, I lost a very dear friend to this terrible disease, Judy Christofilis. She and I had volunteered in the Junior League in Indianapolis over 20 years ago. She was a successful accountant, a pillar of the Indianapolis community, and, above all, a dedicated philanthropist.

She was on the board of the Indianapolis Day Nursery, Indiana's oldest and largest early childhood education nonprofit. She was extremely active in the Junior League of Indianapolis and the Indianapolis Art Center.

But in the last decade of her life, when she was battling breast cancer, she was a founding member of the Indianapolis American Cancer Society Guild and served as its treasurer. The guild's mission is to support the central Indiana office of the American Cancer Society by generating awareness, raising funds, and providing support for community outreach programs to achieve the shared goal of savings lives by helping people stay well, get well, find cures, and fight back.

This mission epitomizes Judy's fight against breast cancer. She battled metastatic breast cancer for more than a decade. Her resilience, and spirit, served as an inspiration to me and so many others in our community.

Her story is just a reminder of why breast cancer screening is vitally important, and it is often the best and only way to identify this cancer in its earliest stages. Women--even young women--are susceptible to this deadly disease, which is why regular breast screenings are so crucially important.

Our bill reauthorizes the program through fiscal year 2024, and it funds CDC programs to identify gaps in education and awareness, particularly among young women and healthcare providers. It supports young survivors through grants to organizations focused on helping them cope with the many unique challenges they face as young women and in implementing a targeted media campaign to reach young and higher-risk women.

The science is clear: Early detection is the single most effective way to stop these cancers before they become deadly.

In my very last conversation with Judy before she passed away in March of this year, she asked me to keep up the fight for all people battling cancer. This bill, in large part, for me, is dedicated to my very dear, close friend Judy Christofolis. She truly is one of my heroes.

Mr. Speaker, I urge our Senate colleagues to pass this important bill this month during Breast Cancer Awareness Month. U.S. Center for SafeSport

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Mrs. BROOKS of Indiana. Mr. Speaker, I urge my colleagues to pass S. 2330, the Empowering Olympic Paralympic and Amateur Athletes Act of 2020.

This bill is the result of several years of work that began in 2016. Indiana's very own Indianapolis Star broke the story about former USA Gymnastics' team doctor, Larry Nassar's abuse of athletes under his care. Several years have passed since Dr. Nassar went to prison, but Congress has continued to work to ensure this kind of abuse never happens again.

In 2017, I led the charge in the House to address the horrible situation by introducing the Protecting Young Victims from Sexual Abuse Act. I was grateful to see it pass the House and see it get signed into law.

That law established the U.S. Center for SafeSport as the entity responsible for developing policies that all U.S. Olympic governing bodies must implement to better protect their athletes and, most critically, the center was charged with investigating claims of abuse against amateur U.S. athletes.

The center has received hundreds of claims they are responsible for investigating. And, today, with the passage of this bill later today, we will help ensure they will be able to fulfill that mandate.

When it was originally conceived, the center was not provided a steady revenue stream, but today S. 2330 will require the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee to provide direct funding to the U.S. Center for SafeSport to guarantee it stays committed to protecting athletes.

This reform, along with many others included in Empowering Olympic, Paralympic, and Amateur Athletes Act, will bring much-needed further reform to ensure our young athletes will not have to suffer at the hands of another in their quest for gold.

Mr. Speaker, I urge all my colleagues to support this measure.

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