The Honorable Nancy Pelosi Office of the Speaker U.S. House of Representatives

The purpose of this letter is twofold. First, we ask you to protect women's health by removing public funding for abortion from all legislation being considered by this Congress because a large body of research supports abortion as a risk factor for breast cancer. Second, we ask Congress to exercise its proper oversight authority and investigate the U.S. National Cancer Institute's failure to protect American women by issuing timely warnings about breast cancer risks. Even as our national attention is presently focused on the devastation in Haiti and the prevention of further loss of life in the face of the tens of thousands already lost, we urgently bring to your attention the fact that the lives and health of thousands of women here in the US are each day unnecessarily put at risk from breast cancer, in part due to confusing and conflicting messages from our own National Cancer Institute (NCI). This past year, three new studies appeared in the peer-reviewed literature reporting a significant link between induced abor-tion and subsequent risk of developing breast cancer, one in Turkey1, one in China2 and one in the US3. The American study (the main focus of which was actually the association between oral contraceptives and breast cancer) was co-authored by Dr. Louise Brinton, Chief of the Hormonal and Reproductive Epidemiology Branch in the NCI’s Division of Cancer Epidemiol