Opinion: Remembering Betty Rollin, who told her breast surgeon that post-operative appearance mattered to her—and other women
Patient advocate Betty Rollin died as she lived: on her own terms.
Women who had undergone disfiguring surgery for breast cancer, according to one surgeon in the 1970s, needed to “stick an old sock in their bra and get on with their lives.” It was this climate that Betty Rollin, then a television correspondent for NBC, entered when she was diagnosed with the disease in 1975. Rollin, who died of voluntary assisted suicide in Switzerland in November at age 87, became a highly visible activist not only for women with breast cancer but also end-of-life issues, after she helped her mother die and then wrote about it.
It is hard enough to challenge the medical establishment over one issue, but Rollin ably pushed in two controversial areas. Her determined personality and prescient instincts greatly helped.
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