Why this film is important

Two hundred and seventy thousand women will contract breast cancer this year.   Forty thousand will die of it; every 13 minutes we will lose another woman to the disease.   This documentary film makes these statistics real by following one woman who is diagnosed, treated and recovers from breast cancer.   Robin demands to know why she got breast cancer, posing questions about their exposure to environmental toxics. Her intimate story brings the visually hidden experience of breast cancer into light, and motivates us to ask why so much illness and why don't we know how to stop it?  

No Family History turns the debate about breast cancer upside down by proposing solutions about prevention, rather searching only for a cure.   We reveal how the pink mask of racing for the cure has hidden the profits and pain of the disease.   A few dedicated experts tell the story of how they began to realize all the toxic exposures in daily life that could be causing the epidemic - toxics in their home and even their own personal care products.   A few dedicated breast cancer activists relate how they tried to improve regulations to prevent breast cancer, and how they have changed their own lives to make it safer.

View the trailer




quicktime trailer - (medium)


In 1980, the famous poet Audre Lourde wrote from her hospital bed:

Cancer is not just another degenerative and unavoidable disease of the ageing process.   It has distinct and identifiable causes, and these are mainly exposures to chemicals of physical agents in the environment.

In 1998, scientist and writer Sandra Steingraber wrote:

Banned pesticides, like fugitives from justice, have not entirely disappeared. We have forgotten about them, but they are still among us. They frequent foreign ports. They languish underground. But they are beginning to surface again in the tissues of women with breast cancer...


Why Prevention?

firefoxPreventing breast cancer rather than just treating it is difficult.   Brave individuals have led this movement.   They have spoken out about the causes of the growing breast cancer epidemic.   Rachel Carson said in 1961:

Today we find our world filled with cancer-producing agents.   An attack on cancer that is concentrated wholly or even largely on therapeutic measures...will fail because it leaves untouched the great reservoirs of carcinogenic agents which would continue to claim new victims...

In 1998, scientist and writer Sandra Steingraber wrote:

Banned pesticides, like fugitives from justice, have not entirely disappeared. We have forgotten about them, but they are still among us. They frequent foreign ports. They languish underground. But they are beginning to surface again in the tissues of women with breast cancer...

Possibilities for making our world less toxic and safer abound.   Breast cancer rates can be decreased.

Watch this film and find out how.

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