Thirty-four years ago, our founders knew that together, their personal tragedies reflected a critical social justice issue that is part of a larger public health crisis. Breast Cancer Action was founded in 1990 by four visionary women who were fed up that there was very little good research on the disease and medical care could be summarized as “slash, burn and poison.”
Breast Cancer Action has always been bigger than any one person – and there have been true giants who have come together to make an outsized difference together. From the very beginning, Eleonor Pred, Susan Claymon, Linda Reyes, and Belle Shayer radicalized the breast cancer movement and brought savvy political chops to their demand that the government address the breast cancer epidemic.
The founders and Breast Cancer Action’s first, full-time Executive Director, the late Barbara Brenner, were known as “The Bad Girls of Breast Cancer.” They boldly demanded more effective, less toxic treatments, and testified before FDA approval panels. They provided free information for anyone who needed it and the BCAction newsletter was published ten times per year and included a Spanish language edition.
Our straight talk and truth-telling about the disease prompted national news programs to come to Barbara Brenner for comment when they needed someone to talk about treatment issues ranging from genetic testing to hormone therapy choices. Journalists sought out the organization’s expertise for everything concerning breast cancer, because of our knowledge about science, policy, and politics. We collaborated with prominent intellectuals including Barbara Ehrenreich, while democratizing knowledge on breast cancer by listening to and carrying the voices of people with the disease.
And of course, Barbara’s own book, So Much to Be Done: The Writings of Breast Cancer Activist Barbara Brenner, highlights her efforts to reframe breast cancer from an individual crisis to a critical public health and social justice issue, placing environmental concerns at the forefront of prevention strategies.
Under Barbara’s tenacious tenure, the organization expanded from pushing for more research and advocating for better treatments to looking at the environmental causes, and focusing on primary prevention of the disease. We prioritized true prevention of the disease and spoke out against the use of tamoxifen in healthy people, a.k.a. “pills for prevention,” because we knew that prevention doesn’t come in a pill – profit does.
We educated our communities and advocated for chemical policy reform. We worked heavily in coalitions and linked environmental toxins to breast cancer. We inspired activists at an international level, including Breast Cancer Action Germany, and several Breast Cancer Action organizations in Canada.
Breast Cancer Action’s comprehensive approach included addressing racial inequities in incidence and treatment and challenging pink ribbon marketing.
In 2002, in response to the overwhelming number of problematic pink ribbon products flooding the shelves during Breast Cancer Awareness Month, we launched our industry-disrupting Think Before You Pink® campaign during an era in which companies sought to benefit their brands by partnering with nonprofits.
Too many companies partnered with prominent breast cancer foundations more concerned with how they could profit from the disease, without taking the toxic carcinogens out of the very products they were marketing in the name of the disease. They emblazoned their guilt with pink ribbons every October in the hope that no one would notice. Well, Breast Cancer Action noticed. And so did you.
Think Before You Pink® forever changed the landscape of pink ribbon marketing and corporate social responsibility, and defined fundraising accountability for our movement and beyond. We coined the term pinkwashing and set the stage for other movements to call out the harms of cause marketing more generally. We achieved outsized wins and changed entire industries with our rallying cry – Think Before You Pink!
By the end of Barbara’s tenure, Breast Cancer Action had established itself as the watchdog of the breast cancer movement, operationalized our groundbreaking policy on corporate contributions – that stated we’d never take funds from companies that profited from or contributed to breast cancer – and grew the budget to almost 1 million dollars.
Small but righteous and mighty, we went on to continue to achieve outsized wins. Unbeholden to corporate funders, we were the only breast cancer organization to join as a plaintiff on the lawsuit against Myriad Genetics that was brought by the ACLU in 2009.
We rallied at the Supreme Court during oral arguments, and on June 13, 2013, the US Supreme Court ruled in our favor to strike down Myriad Genetics’ patents on the human “breast cancer genes,” BRCA1 and BRCA2 – and not just Myriad’s patents, but patents on all human genes. The unanimous win at the US Supreme Court five years later set invaluable precedent overturning corporate gene patents.
Throughout the 2010s, under the leadership of Executive Director Karuna Jaggar, Breast Cancer Action continued to expand its national presence and deepen its work. In addition to building a national board, tripling membership, and strengthening operations, Karuna carried the national media profile and commentary forward.
She was a sought-after resource for national media looking to understand breast cancer issues, was a frequent guest on national TV and radio, spoke at prominent events, and published dozens of op-eds in national newspapers such as the Washington Post, the San Francisco Chronicle, and The Guardian, including a regular column on the Huffington Post.
We also sharpened our focus in multiple arenas: we expanded and further clarified our conflict of interest policy, including prohibiting representation on the Board of Directors for anyone profiting from breast cancer. And we homed in on the environmental causes of breast cancer and called out polluters and profiteers alike.
Do you remember oil and gas giant Baker Hughes’ pink ribbon drill bit “for the cure?” Karuna was interviewed by Samantha Bee in a spectacular segment on how Komen accepted funds from this partnership, and we unabashedly named it “the most ludicrous piece of pink sh*t we’ve seen all year.”
We were the first to highlight the link between fracking chemicals and an increase in breast cancer risk, and took it further by connecting the dots at every stage of the fossil fuel economy to this risk. We expanded our work in coalition with the environmental justice movement, joined numerous impactful coalitions in which we were the sole breast cancer organization, achieved outsized wins in stopping PFAS, worked to stop the proliferation of fossil fuels, and tirelessly advocated for the elimination of harmful environmental exposures that increased our risk for breast cancer – especially those emblazoned with a pink ribbon like Susan G. Komen’s hormone-disruptor filled perfume, which we “Raised a Stink” about.
Clear eyed that breast cancer is and always has been a social justice issue, we deepened our racial justice analysis and worked to challenge white supremacy, including toxic beauty products targeted to Black women and other women of color.
Breast cancer has always been bigger than our personal choices, and is rooted in systems of oppression. Which is why we’ve always done this work through a critical, social justice lens that is soft on people and hard on systems.
With the guidance of our most recent Executive Director, Dr. Krystal Redman (KR, they/she, pictured on the right), since 2020, we expanded our intersectional and racial justice lenses, enhanced internal organizational policies and practices that reflect a commitment to equity, worked to expand our strategic partnerships, and relentlessly called out the inequities that still exist for low-income communities and people of color.
For far too long, despite the successes of medical and scientific advances, breast cancer disparities have continued to widen, and stopping breast cancer for all communities has remained largely deprioritized.
Our patient-centered, unbiased resources including fact sheets, podcasts, legislative sign-ons, and Think Before You Pink® campaigns, unequivocally named the impacts of environmental racism, redlining, racist zoning practices, and the disproportionate harms of the fossil fuel industry on BIPOC communities with a new depth, tying each back to our risk for breast cancer.
And speaking of taking on huge targets, during this time we also called out entire presidential administrations – with our 2020 Think Before You Pink® campaign, “We Can’t Be Pink’d” – and rampant, unregulated capitalism – with our 20th anniversary Think Before You Pink® campaign, “A (R)Evolution” in 2022.
A campaign unlike any other, A “(R)Evolution” connected two decades of pink ribbon marketing campaigns and named capitalism as that which enables pink ribbon marketing and profiteering from breast cancer.
Over the past 34 years, Breast Cancer Action has accomplished so much. And while important work remains, we also know there are more breast cancer organizations than ever before with deeply intersectional and justice-focused missions. We are proud to pass the torch and know that this vital work remains in good hands.