Moving beyond pink ribbons

Title: Moving beyond pink ribbons

Author: Peggy Orenstein

Publication:  Los Angeles Times

Date: February 15, 2012

Over the last two weeks, as Susan G. Komen for the Cure revoked funding for Planned Parenthood, then reversed itself, I watched through the scrim of something that, while less newsworthy, was, to me, no less significant: the death of Rachel Cheetham Moro, the 42-year-old writer of the blog Cancer Culture Chronicles…

Rachel had metastatic cancer — the kind that spreads beyond the breast. And guess what? It turns out that despite the money flowing to breast cancer charities — particularly Komen — the death rate among those with metastatic disease has not budged in 25 years. What’s more, the actual number of women (and men) who die of breast cancer today — about 40,000 annually — is greater than it was in the 1980s. That’s right: More people die now than did three decades ago. True, the overall breast cancer death rates — as a percentage of those diagnosed — have dropped, but that’s in part because mammography is really, really good at finding and diagnosing, for instance, DCIS, which means ductal carcinoma in situ. DCIS is Stage 0 cancer, which will probably never become invasive…

And so, even as pink ribbons have proliferated, even as breast cancer has become polite dinner table conversation, the actual lived experience of women with advanced disease — women like Rachel Cheetham Moro — has been pushed to the margins…

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