The Great Debate

Actress Angelina Jolie’s tattoos on her left arm show the latitude and longitude of the birthplaces of her children and her partner Brad Pitt, January 29, 2012. REUTERS/Mike Blake

We use that word so often: choice.

It has become the code word for abortion, alas, and thus a lightening rod for activists on both sides of that continuing battle. But this week Angelina Jolie redeemed the word and the idea behind it — that a woman has a right to choose what happens to her body, however tough that choice sometimes is.

The one she made — and announced in an stunning New York Times Op-Ed — to have a double prophylactic mastectomy was gutsy, and, as she herself wrote, “not easy” — though doctors told her that she was carrying a faulty gene that upped her chances of getting the disease that killed her mother to 87 percent.

These are the moments of truth for any woman. When you look at your life; assess the risks; what’s at stake; what matters to you (and those you love), and then step up and say, yes, I will take control here.

I will make this rough decision. I will let my breasts be removed that I might live to see my kids grow up. There was something both fierce and tender in Jolie’s words, always the best, most winning combination.

Three years ago, President Obama signed the Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act into law. Those of us present knew we were witnessing history. With the stroke of a pen and strong bipartisan support from Congress, the Food and Drug Administration was charged with protecting public health from tobacco use – the nation’s single most preventable cause of disease, disability and death. More than 1,200 people die each day in the United States because of cigarette use. That is one person every 71 seconds. Today, I am pleased to report that the law is working.

In passing the Tobacco Control Act, Congress recognized that the linchpin of any successful strategy to reduce adult tobacco use must be to prevent young people from ever starting. More than 80 percent of adult U.S. smokers begin smoking as teens. Each day more than 3,800 young people under age 18 smoke their first cigarette, and more than 1,000 become daily cigarette smokers. Reversing this trend requires aggressive action on two fronts: reducing the attractiveness of tobacco products to children and ending their access to them. That’s exactly what the FDA is doing.

During our first 12 months of regulating tobacco, the FDA pulled candy and certain other flavored cigarettes off the market; issued tough new regulations to halt sales of cigarettes, cigarette tobacco, and smokeless tobacco to young people; banned brand-name sponsorship of sporting events and concerts; and implemented requirements for new warning labels for smokeless tobacco products. The FDA also has begun funding state authorities to assure vigorous enforcement of these new actions to protect our children.

Henrietta Lacks died in 1951 of cancer in a “colored” ward at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore. But the cells doctors took from her body before she died are still alive today, in labs all over the world. They’ve been to space, were part of atomic bomb testing, and were critical in developing the polio vaccine and other scientific advances.

Companies made millions selling Lacks’ cells – known as HeLa cells – but her family had no idea until the early 1970s, when scientists decided they could learn more about cancer and other diseases by studying the Lacks family DNA – all without their consent. The family didn’t see a dime of those profits, and had very little idea of what had happened to Henrietta, who is buried in an unmarked grave in a dying town in Virginia.

Rebecca Skloot spent ten years tracking down the history of HeLa and the Lacks family. The New York Times called the result – “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks”– “a thorny and provocative book about cancer, racism, scientific ethics and crippling poverty.” Others have heaped on similar praise.