For 30 years, Breast Cancer Action has worked to address and end the breast cancer epidemic. We’ve pushed back on corporations, non-profit organizations, and government agencies that have lowered regulatory standards, undermined safety and efficacy in new treatments, spread misinformation, and empty awareness, and limited access to quality affordable healthcare. We have been doing this work and now it’s time for the administration to step up and do theirs!
October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month, an important time to examine what our public health officials are doing—and failing to do—to prevent and mitigate the devastation that breast cancer causes. The current administration, from the President down to agency leaders, has failed to take on the breast cancer epidemic. We see the far-reaching failures of the administration most notably in these four federal agencies:
The federal government has an essential role in addressing the breast cancer epidemic and protecting women’s health, but instead of implementing real change, the administration implements only “pink policies.”
Pink Policies, are political pinkwashing in action. They are policies, or a lack of policies, that fail to protect people living with breast cancer and increase breast cancer risk for all people, especially for women, people of color, and low-income people.
These types of “pink policies” are some the most unabashed and ultimately devastating forms of pinkwashing we’ve ever dealt with, in their far-reaching failures and systemic-level harms.
Join us to call out the administrations failures in leadership in addressing the breast cancer epidemic!
The Environmental Protection Agency favors industry and ignores public health science. It has rolled back nearly 70 critical environmental and public health rules and regulations, with at least 30 more rollbacks in process this year. This blatant disregard for human health knowingly and directly increases women’s exposure to known and suspected carcinogens.
The Food and Drug Administration allows drugs, devices, and other consumer products to be rushed to market to benefit industry. Consumers, including breast cancer patients, who purchase FDA regulated drugs, devices, and products are misled to believe they are safe.
NCI’s purported mission is to lead, conduct, and support cancer research to advance scientific knowledge and help all people live longer, healthier lives. NCI’s website, accessible to both clinicians and the public, is a go-to resource for cancer prevention, but the agency leaves out critical information on environmental links to breast cancer and instead focuses on risk factors that are immutable, such as aging and family history of the disease.
The Attorney General is working to invalidate the Affordable Care Act (ACA) in a Supreme Court case that will be heard in November, the impacts of which would be devastating for the 29 million people covered by the ACA, and the nearly 54 million Americans with preexisting conditions, including breast cancer. Instead of attacking our health care system we need leaders who push for ensuring universal access to affordable, high quality healthcare for all.
Breast cancer is a social justice issue and public health crisis that urgently needs to be addressed. We need our leaders to implement policies that will ensure fewer women develop breast cancer and that no community bears a disproportionate burden of diagnosis or death from this disease.
This administration’s aggressive deregulation efforts, lack of oversight, dissemination of misinformation, and efforts to dismantle access to quality and affordable health care exacerbate systemic inequities that are the foundation of American society. The administration’s paternalistic leadership reinforces systemic racism and gender oppression by putting forth policies that are especially dangerous for low-income women and women of color. These communities are already facing disproportionately less protection from toxic exposures, less support from healthcare systems, and less assurance that their breast cancer treatments will be effective.
The time to step up and take breast cancer seriously is long overdue! Take action and tell the administration that we need policies that support public health, not industry interests, anti-science approaches, and corporate profits.
Take Action: Tell the Leaders of this Administration We Can’t Be Pink’d! We need leaders, policies, and regulations that put women living with and at risk of breast cancer first. Join us in demanding our leaders stop minimizing the harsh realities of breast cancer, sidelining science, and reinforcing health inequities!