Hope.

For decades, we’ve been fighting breast cancer with hope. For decades, the lives of our daughters, mothers, and friends have been in the hands of hope.

It isn’t working. In 1991 the number of American women that died of breast cancer every day was 119. Today it’s about the same - 110 deaths. Every single day. Twenty years. No significant progress.

In 1975, a woman had a 1 in 11 chance of developing invasive breast cancer in her lifetime. Now, that risk is 1 in 8 – nearly 50% greater; yes greater.

Plainly, we need something more powerful than hope.

We didn’t hope our way to the moon. If all we ventured was hope, we’d still be on the ground.

We got to the moon because we set a deadline for getting there. We have never had a deadline for the end of breast cancer. It’s not that we tried and it failed. We’ve never tried. We have never had one. Never.

No date. No goal. No rush. Nothing to hold ourselves accountable to. No one on the hook. No reputations at stake. Is it any wonder we haven’t ended it? How can we possibly achieve a goal if we don’t have one?

Consoled by hope, we keep giving breast cancer more time.

No more.

Today we give up hope. It’s the most optimistic step ever taken in the history of the breast cancer battle.

Today we set a goal. Today we set a deadline. January 1, 2020. The end of breast cancer. Hope is a wish. The deadline is a commitment. Hope says whenever. The deadline says within ten years. What if we fail? We already have. What about pink? It’s time to show our true colors. Ten years is too short? We ended polio in seven.

A deadline changes everything. No experiment, no charity, no lab, no doubt, no promise, no critic, no iota of research can occur outside of its context. Today the conversation changes. 2020. The end of breast cancer. This is serious. This is real. Are you with us?