The other day, I started to walk the dogs but had to take them back inside as soon as we left the driveway. I live on a corner. The entire intersection was brilliant pink—streets, corners, and adjacent lawns. It was not a thin film, like the pine pollen we get here every spring, but thick, solid-looking, like paint. A passing car revealed, however, that it was not solid; opaque pink clouds rose whenever a car passed. I would not go closer to investigate, so I knocked on a neighbor’s door. It turns out there had been a road race very early in the morning, and the runners had chosen our intersection to dump huge quantities of some kind of pink powder over themselves and all the surrounding area. We didn’t know what the powder was. What we did know was that we couldn’t breathe out there and obviously I couldn’t take the dogs for a walk.

This was all part of the world’s turning pink during the month of October, Breast Cancer Awareness Month. Odd title, that. Is there really anyone in the world who is not aware of breast cancer? We’re exhorted by pink headlines in the newspapers with their full-age ads, in shopping centers, grocery stores—everywhere—to be aware of breast cancer and give money wherever we see a pink ribbon image.

Well, what exactly is this “awareness” supposed to mean? Get a mammogram. Okay, everybody does already; after all, they’re free. No other medical test is so free or so easily available. Mammograms alone, they would have you believe, constitute “prevention.” But they don’t prevent; they only detect. How does one prevent breast cancer? Not much info on that.

Actually, there is. And it’s fairly simple. There used to be actual figures available about the connection between birth control pills/devices and breast cancer. There used to be figures available about the connection between abortion and breast cancer. The figures were conclusive and compelling: one’s risk of breast cancer increased exponentially (to the point where we have today a virtual pandemic) with the use of synthetic hormones and/or abortions. But that was before Planned Parenthood took over breast cancer research. What happened to those figures? Well, now the website of the Susan Komen Foundation says there’s “no evidence of a link.” It’s just disappeared, apparently…