[Congressional Record Volume 167, Number 67 (Monday, April 19, 2021)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E420-E421]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




   HONORING CYNTHIA PEARSON AND HER OUTSTANDING CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE 
                       HEALTH OF WOMEN AND GIRLS

                                 ______
                                 

                          HON. ROSA L. DeLAURO

                             of connecticut

                    in the house of representatives

                         Monday, April 19, 2021

  Ms. DeLAURO. Madam Speaker, it is an honor and pleasure to extend my 
congratulations to Cynthia Pearson, a leader of the women's health 
movement for many decades, on her exceptional service to the women of 
the United States and on her well-earned retirement.
  Cynthia has served as Executive Director of the National Women's 
Health Network (NWHN) for more than 24 years, and prior to that led the 
organization's program and policy work. In that time she established an 
exemplary record as an effective and influential advocate, leading 
campaigns to protect women from risky drugs and devices; require the 
government to research conditions that affect women; ensure that women 
have access to full information about medical products and clinical 
trials; expand women's access to comprehensive reproductive health care 
services; and protect women against coercion and abuse in health care. 
I would like to highlight just a few of the accomplishments of her 
leadership at the NWHN and the contributions it made to advancing 
research for women's health and increasing access to health care.
  In 1987, Cynthia and the National Women's Health Network led a 
grassroots campaign that convinced the National Cancer Institute to 
fund the first breast cancer prevention trial that examined the effects 
of a low-fat diet on breast cancer. And Cynthia helped the NWHN to 
produce the first-ever fact sheets on breast cancer and African 
American, Latina, Native American and Asian American women, 
highlighting the disparities in survival experienced by women of color 
and building momentum for targeted outreach programs. Her work on 
breast cancer also included advocacy that prompted the U.S. Congress to 
investigate the lack of informed consent in trials of a breast cancer 
treatment drug that was being given to healthy women. As a result of 
that investigation, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) revised 
their informed consent rules for government-funded clinical trials, 
ensuring that future volunteers would be given complete information 
about serious and potentially fatal risks associated with study drugs.

[[Page E421]]

  With Cynthia's leadership, the NWHN became one of the first and most 
prescient critics of the unproven, yet widespread, use of menopause 
hormone therapy to prevent heart disease in women. In 1990, Cynthia 
testified at the Food and Drug Administration, persuading the agency 
not to approve preventive use of the drugs without first requiring the 
sponsors to provide the same standard of evidence from placebo 
controlled trials that it had required for all drugs approved for heart 
disease prevention in men. A year later, she spearheaded the NWHN's 
successful advocacy to persuade the NIH to fund and launch the largest 
ever study of the health of older women, the Women's Health Initiative, 
which enrolled more than 27,000 women in clinical trials of menopause 
hormone therapy.
  In 2002, Cynthia's skepticism about menopause hormone therapy was 
proven well-founded when the Women's Health Initiative showed that 
hormone therapy does not prevent heart disease and, in fact, increases 
the risk of stroke and in some cases, breast cancer. Cynthia and the 
NWHN educated women about the results of those trials, so that they 
could make more informed decisions about whether to use menopause 
hormone therapy. This led to the largest-ever drop in breast cancer 
rates. In one decade, more than 160,000 women did not get breast cancer 
because the NWHN helped them avoid exposure to the drugs that would 
have caused it. In 2012, Cynthia received the Grassroots Activism Award 
from the National Breast Cancer Coalition in recognition of this 
lifesaving work.
  Cynthia also successfully advocated for the NIH to fund the only 
multi-ethnic long-term study of the menopause transition in healthy 
women. The study enrolled more than 3,000 women and has resulted in 
nearly 500 publications, providing essential information that enables 
women to understand what is normal in menopause, and how that's 
different across race and ethnicity.
  Starting in 2007, as a co-founder of Raising Women's Voices for the 
Health Care We Need, a national collaborative initiative that supports 
quality affordable health care for all, Cynthia helped build the 
grassroots support that was integral to the successful enactment of the 
Affordable Care Act, which extended health insurance coverage to tens 
of thousands of women. The coverage made possible by the Affordable 
Care Act has provided women with access to lifesaving health care, 
including no co-pay coverage for preventive care such as cervical 
cancer screening and contraceptive care. In recent years, Cynthia 
worked within the Raising Women's Voices collaborative to help defeat 
multiple attempts to dismantle the Affordable Care Act and has been 
instrumental in bringing the voices of women, people of color, and 
LGBTQ people to the national health care debate.
  In the reproductive health arena, working in partnership with the 
SisterSong Women of Color Reproductive Justice Collective, Cynthia and 
the NWHN created a statement of principles to guide the provision of 
long-acting reversible contraceptives. The statement was signed by over 
a hundred organizations and has helped keep patient autonomy front and 
center, protecting patients from coercive practices while expanding 
access to contraception.
  Finally, in addition to being an effective educator of consumers and 
a persuasive advocate in her attempts to influence government policy, 
Cynthia has been an essential ally and partner to policymakers working 
within the federal government. In 2018, she helped organize a 
lightning-speed advocacy campaign that in just one week saved the Food 
and Drug Administration Office of Women's Health from an attempt to 
defund it and prevent its staff from doing the work the office was 
established to do.
  I ask my colleagues to join me in extending our sincerest 
appreciation to Cynthia Pearson for her vital contributions to the 
health of women and girls.

                          ____________________