Senator Barbara Boxer, Chairman

Thank you for the opportunity to testify at this important hearing. Today I shall focus on three things: 1. Disturbing trends about male and female reproductive health and development. 2. How chemicals in our environment can affect reproductive and developmental health and the relationship to developing adult diseases. 3. What we can do to preserve our health and that of future generations. First, before I begin about trends I’d like to share some experiences during my career as a reproductive endocrinologist and infertility specialist. I have treated thousands of patients with infertility and other reproductive disorders – young men with very abnormal sperm or with a history of testicular cancer; young women, some of them as young as 17, already in menopause; little girls with onset of puberty at 6 or 8 yrs old; and women with estrogen-dependent disorders, like endometriosis and uterine fibroids that can result in incapacitating pain, lead to compromised fertility and increased risk of miscarriage. For the most part, we do not know the underlying causes of these