Skip to Content, Navigation, or Footer.
Friday, March 29, 2024
The Observer

Support for 'Bras Around the Bend' display

In response to Lauren Galgano's "Downtown display inappropriate," I find her statements like a bra with no wire - lacking support.She should really "push up" her opinion with some facts. One in eight women in the United States will be diagnosed with some form of breast cancer sometime in their life (American Cancer Association). This translates into about 212,920 women who will be found to have breast cancer this year, and about 40,970 of those women will have died from it.How can you bash a display that is intended to bring awareness and raise funds for research that can reduce the number of women dying every single year from breast cancer?This disease will even affect many of the women on the Notre Dame campus in one way or another. I am one of them. My mother is still in remission after being diagnosed with breast cancer three years ago. She is a women who all her life stressed about being a conservative, upstanding woman. After being diagnosed, she quickly realized that there is no shame for her body. This is coming from a woman who was afraid to take her bra off for mammograms in front of a female nurse! After surgery, chemotherapy, radiation, hundreds of check ups, needing the help of her daughter to bathe, she is not ashamed - not ashamed of her bra or her breasts.Even more so, my family and I used humor to help her forget about the pain, about the sickness that came with chemotherapy, about the loss of her hair, about the trouble getting in and out of bed, about the struggle to get healthy so she can enjoy her life once again with her family.The "Bras Around the Bend" display does not have an underlying innuendo about sexuality. It is meant to raise awareness through something that helps thousands of individuals forget about their pain - through humor. And Lauren Galgano, if you cannot be mature enough to see beyond this display, then you are marginalizing the pain, the struggle, the love and the support of what that display means to hundreds of thousands of people.

LuLu MerazsophomoreMcGlinn HallOct. 28