Angelina Jolie and Women’s Cancer Decisions

It was quite a shock two years ago when actress Angelina Jolie announced she’d undergone a double mastectomy. Jolie revealed she was a carrier of a gene, BRCA1, which she said gave her an 87 percent chance of getting breast cancer. Today, in an op-ed in the New York Times, Jolie announced her ovaries and fallopian tubes were recently removed, too, partly because her mother died of ovarian cancer at age 56. We hear about the ramifications of such surgery from a woman who went through the same thing, and from a medical professional about the risks and benefits.

Photo: Gage Skidmore