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“If shopping could cure breast cancer, it would be cured by now,” says Think Before You Pink, an organization dedicated to ending “pinkwashing”—slapping pink ribbons on products in order to convince consumers that they can end breast cancer by buying pink products. In truth, reports Forbes, corporations seek to profit off consumers’ strong feelings about breast cancer while simultaneously marketing products that actually contribute to the disease.
Such was the case with KFC’s cancer-linked chicken, sold in “Buckets for the Cure,” which, adding insult to injury, didn’t really raise much money for cancer research, either, as is often the case with pinkwashing campaigns. And what little money makes it to breast cancer research frequently goes to support antiquated, unreliable experiments on animals.
I lost the person I was closest to in the world—my grandmother—to breast cancer, but I know that no matter how many pink sun visors I buy, it is unlikely that I am doing much to help with the search for a cure. Women deserve better than greedy corporations throwing a few pennies at a charity in exchange for huge profit margins. We deserve better than having our money spent on experiments that have proved to be useless. We deserve a cure, and the only way to find one is to stop buying pink doohickeys and start supporting breast cancer research that works—cutting-edge, effective, non-animal research.
Written by Michelle Sherrow
