Andrew Becker, Director of Media Relations for the American Cancer Society, let fly a tone-deaf blog post a few days ago regarding the Bald Barbie grass roots campaign that is growing via Facebook. The goal of the campaign is to help women and girls cope with their hair loss during treatment and feel beautiful. In his article he posits that childhood cancer doesn’t need more awareness, what it needs is more donations. One would assume he means donations to the American Cancer Society, unless he advocates fundraising for other charities. I’ll let you make up your mind on that one.
He started off the post by asking who would financially benefit from sale of the dolls, a fair question to ask. The intellectual dishonesty then crept in as he lamented the troubles that too much awareness can bring citing the fear women now have of breast cancer. Then he flew off the rails with this gem “Childhood cancer is exceedingly rare.”
First of all, what qualifies as exceedingly rare? Considering that the author has three children I find that statement to be emotionally disconnected at best. On Wikipedia I would have tagged this as [citation needed]. Secondly, thanks for confirming the ACS’s lack of relevance in this area.
So if I read correctly, we don’t need more awareness for childhood cancer because it is “exceedingly rare” what we need are more donations to the ACS, less than 1% of which will go to childhood cancer? Got it.
![On March 9th, a year ago this week Shanna and I were awoken in our bed by soft touches from Layla. There she lay between us, knowing it was her time and awoke us as if to say good bye. We looked Layla in her eyes, held her hands and spoke soft words of love [...]](http://laylagrace.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/layla-hat-249x187.jpg "Good to Great")