Angelina Jolie has announced that she went through a
double mastectomy to reduce her chances of getting breast cancer. Jolie, who wrote a piece for the New York Times explaining her experience, says that her risk of breast cancer dropped from 87 percent to just five percent after the procedure. Jolie's mother, Marcheline Bertrand, died of cancer in 2007. "I choose not to keep my story private because there are many women who do not know that they might be living under the shadow of cancer. It is my hope that they, too, will be able to get gene tested, and that if they have a high risk they, too, will know that they have strong options," wrote Jolie.