Pinkwashing

The Breast Cancer Awareness Information Women Aren't Hearing

Unless you live under a rock, you know that October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month. The observation traces back to 1993, when President Bill Clinton designated the third Friday in October as National Mammography Day. Since then, October has become the most pink-washed month of the year, with even pro football players dressing themselves in hot pink. Meanwhile, the rest of us can buy a pink version of nearly any sports accessory, car paraphernalia, or other kitsch to show our support, raise awareness, or virtue signal, as the case may be. 

Missy Amato at PuckerMob gives 31 reasons to wear pink in October, some of which are about raising awareness of known risk factors, including smoking, excessive alcohol use, obesity, and a family history of breast cancer. In keeping with politically correct bona fides, she also said to wear pink "to show that you oppose Planned Parenthood being defunded [because] Planned Parenthood is the top provider of mammograms," but – oops, that's completely false.

In any event, though, I think it's great that people want to promote women's health. So, in the spirit of awareness-raising, here are two risk factors and one preventive measure you probably haven't heard about:

• Lesbians and bisexual women appear to be at higher risk, and transgender women may be so as well due to hormone therapies used as part of their sex change treatment. Reports of these links tend not to associate the cancer risk with the sexual practices per se, but rather connect it to the factors Missy at PuckerMob listed, plus a few others, such as inadequate insurance, mistrust of healthcare providers, higher rates of mental illnesses, and body dysphoria (because "butch women may have an especially difficult time paying attention to their breasts," according to Camille Beredjick at The Advocate).

• Women with a history of abortion have been shown statistically to be at higher risk. While several health care outlets, including specifically LGBT-oriented ones, acknowledge the lesbianism-breast cancer link, this is not so in the case of the abortion connection, even though it has been more thoroughly researched and documented. Not only is information about the abortion-breast cancer link not made widely available, all of our public health care organizations misinform us on this life and death matter. The National Cancer Institute, the American Cancer Society, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists in the UK, the Canadian Cancer Society, World Health Organization, and Susan G. Komen (which is especially perverse, given that it's specifically about breast cancer) all maintain, based on a 2003 "workshop," that abortion produces no heightened breast cancer risk. For the full story on the hush-hush nature of this mystery, see the excellent film Hush, by Punam Kumar Gill, who, though she remains an ardent pro-choice feminist, says our public health care agencies aren't being straight with us. See writeups here and here, or watch it free on Amazon Prime.

And here's the preventive measure we're not hearing about: Pregnancy and breastfeeding, especially during a woman's twenties but at the latest before age 35, is associated with lower risks, not only of breast cancer, but of endometrial, and ovarian cancers as well.

It would be one thing if the sexual anarchists promoted choices that were just lifestyle differences of little consequence. But we're talking about matters of life and death, here. Tell me again, who exactly is it that is waging a war on women?