Pinkwashing Hell: Breast Removal as a Form of "Prevention"

Posted 11/27/12 at 07:12 AM	#1
Sayer Ji, Contributor Activist Post Following closely on the heels of the year's most intensive annual cause-marketing campaign, October's Breast Cancer Awareness Month, two chilling events of grave concern to women and their health were widely (but mostly superficially) reported on in the mainstream media. First, Allyn Rose, Miss America contestant, announced in early November that she would be undergoing a double mastectomy to "prevent" breast cancer. Rose, a healthy 24-year old Maryland native who lost her mother to breast cancer when she was 16, has been lauded by certain media outlets as an "awareness raising" role model for having the courage to take this "precautionary step" and for spreading her mastectomy-inspired "message of preventive health care" to the masses. Many of the reports discussed how her decision was spurned by her awareness of having a genetic predisposition for breast cancer. Second, on Nov. 22nd, the New England Journal of Medicine published a review of the past 30 years of mammography finding that not only has the widespread promotion and adoption of breast screenings by millions of women not reduced their mortality (on the contrary, screenings have increased their relative risk of mortality), but that 1.3 million of these women were overdiagnosed and wrongly treated for abnormal findings that were not even cancer, i.e. were screening detected breast abnormalities that if left untreated would have caused no harm to women. Not surprisingly, this paradigm-challenging finding, in the tradition of embargoed science, was exactly timed to be released to the public on the eve of a major holiday. Read more »