Blossom Ball 2025 - Endometriosis Foundation of America
May 15, 2025
Pierre Hotel in New York City
Fareed Zakaria
It is my really great pleasure and personal honor to introduce someone who has been part of the found journey from the beginning. Farid Zacharia. I joined us at the first Blossom Ball, 2009, the first, and here he's again, 17 years later, continues this journey with us, that kind of loyalty and belief. Our mission means to the world, to me and to this community. Ferri is one of the most respected voices in global affairs. She needs more. He doesn't need more instruction, but introduction, but let me finish it. He hosts CNN's flagship international program, which I always watch, try to GPS. He's also a columnist. He writes beautifully in Washington Post, New York Times. He has earned Peabody Award, two Emmys and Padma Busan, one of the India's highest civilian honors. But beyond his incredible accolades, ferries has always been thoughtful, compassionate friend to this cause. Supposing supporting end ofan with sincerity and purpose from very beginning tonight as we reflect our how far we can come and work and still work together ahead. I can not think of a more fitting voice to guide us forward. Please join me. Welcoming Aria.
Thank you. Thank you so much, Dr. Kin. I have to call him Dr. Kin. That's the only thing I've known him as. So why was I the keynote speaker at the First Blossom Ball and why was I supporting endometriosis for the reason that men often do good things in life? My wife asked me to do it, and she's here now. Now my ex-wife, she came to her senses, but she's still here to honor and support. The one thing we both still deeply believe in together is Dr. Kin and Endometriosis. But it's a fascinating example of how you get involved in things serendipitously, accidentally, and then how it takes on a larger hold in your life. Because once we got involved, we then learned that Dr. Seskin was just Paula's ob, GYN. He delivered our youngest child, but we knew we got to know somebody else, a good friend who was another patient of Dr.
Kin's who had some very difficult troubles with endometriosis, which Dr. Kin miraculously was able to handle. And then we kept involved and we kept involved because Dr. Kin is such a charismatic and interesting person, and he became a friend, and Paula in particular stayed involved. But then one day my second child, our second child, Lila, came to us and was describing the fact that she was having painful periods. And after a while, a year or two finally decided she wanted to really get that examined, and she went to an O-B-G-Y-N in New York, and he said to her, your ovaries are covered with this stuff. I don't know what to do. I'm sorry, this is beyond my pay grade. And she came and told us, and we had this moment you have as a parent where you just panic and you think to yourself, how could this happen? But for us, it was mixed with a strange sense of relief because the minute we heard what she was going through, we knew we had a savior in Dr. Seskin. And so we knew there was a path forward. And three weeks later, Dr. Seskin did a five and a half hour surgery on her, and she's here now and in fantastic help. Lila, do you want to stand again?
And it's a moment like that that you realize so many things about life, but what is really important to you, right? You're going through your life, you have this interesting life and career and friends and travel, and then something like this happens and you think to yourself, no, actually you have only one thing going on in your life, which is how do you make sure that your child is protected? And the fact that Dr. Kin would do something like that is for us, for Paula and me, a lifesaver for Lila, of course, a lifesaver. But the extraordinary thing about Dr. Kin is that he doesn't stop just at the idea of helping the one patient, the two patients, the five patients a day. He may see, he's asking himself, how do you have an impact on a broader scale? How do you do this in a way that actually transforms thousands and thousands and hundreds of thousands of women's lives and lived experiences?
And how do you take that worry out of the millions of families that worry around it? And to me, that is the extraordinary quality that Dr. Satchin has. He is a brilliant surgeon, he's a brilliant doctor, but he's also trying to do something on a much larger scale so that it helps not just his patients, but the patients of hundreds and thousands of doctors all over the world. And doing that I think is the only way you actually change this. And this experience has made me realize how hard it's been because we still do live in a man's world where women's diseases are not noticed as much. They're not funded as much, things are not organized around it as much. When we walked into this beautiful banquet hall, Paula and a Liah were commenting on how cold it is in here. And one was wishing they had brought a shawl.
The other was glad they brought a jacket. And I said, yeah, because air conditioning is set for men's clothes. We are sitting in our wool suits and we're fine. But it's just one more example of how, without even thinking about it, the world is structured in a certain way. And one of the many challenges that endometriosis faces is how do you give it a profile in a world where so much of the default is still centered around men? I want to just note the extraordinary importance of this ball because it marks the beginning of this new center and this new program, and I think you couldn't have got a better person. Dr. Kin had it than Samir who we had the honor of exchanging a few words with because you could tell that this is a person truly passionate and dedicated to this idea. And that's something you need right now.
Because let's face it, we are going through a very difficult period in the United States, particularly around the legitimacy of science, the legitimacy of fact, the legitimacy of research, and at a time when all these things are under scrutiny and under pressure, the fact that you have scientists who are willing to do this kind of work and to do it no matter what, because this is the calling. That's what we have to hope for. Because these are times when we've been through them before Samir was saying they burned the library in Alexandria, they executed Galileo. I mean, their scientists have gone through all this for a long time. The scopes trial on evolution took place in this country. And you forget the scientists always win, right? At the end of the day, science continues. It perseveres, it expands because it addresses the deepest human need for survival and flourishing.
And so it's all the more incumbent on all of you who are here to try to help Dr. Sachin and Samir. Because at a time when the government is cutting back, when you are finding this extraordinary skepticism where you have these assaults on signs of those of us who have benefited from all the science, who benefited from the passion of people like Dr. Kin and Samir, if we don't support it, then who will? So I really do urge you take this day, let's try at a moment when there are all these pressures to show that we as people, we as a society still believe in science. We still have the hope, and we still have the willingness to support this science because we do know that it's going to help millions and millions of women for many, many years to come. Thank you all so much. Thank.
