AlterNet: What Angelina Jolie Didn't Tell You About Breast Cancer and That Gene

Making money off illness is sickening. Depriving the needy of life-saving healthcare should be criminal.

Last month, I lost my too-young-to-die sister to a BRCA#1 breast cancer. When I was a toddler not yet in kindergarten, breast cancer robbed me of my mother. I am a BRCA#1 gene carrier, and recently wrote about it in my memoir, Raising Expectations and Raising Hell. Neither my sister nor my mother’s premature deaths, nor my own writing could possibly have turned BRCA#1 (and #2) into a household conversation the way a beautiful movie star could. Like millions of women, I have been reading the praise, the misogynist “jokes,” and the criticism being lobbed at Angelina Jolie.

http://www.alternet.org/personal-health/angelina-jolie-and-breast-cancer