Dr. Susan Love, one of the world’s foremost breast cancer researchers and a visionary leader in breast cancer advocacy, died at age 75 on July 2, 2023. In 1993, Love and her partner (later wife) were also the first same-sex parents in Massachusetts to both be named legal parents of their child, a case later cited in support of the state’s landmark marriage equality ruling.
Dr. Love was a breast surgeon and an outspoken critic of the medical establishment’s paternalistic treatment of women. She was an early advocate of cancer surgery that conserves as much breast tissue as possible, and was among the first to warn of the risks of routine hormone replacement therapy (HRT) during menopause, per the Dr. Susan Love Research Foundation.
I had the honor of interviewing Dr. Love in 2009 (reposted here in 2012), just a year after she launched her Army of Love (now the Love Research Army), recruiting a wide range of people to volunteer for breast cancer studies. Most previous studies of breast cancer had been on women with cancer or on animals, she told me. Love believed that only by involving real people, with and without cancer, would we be able to determine how the disease really develops. She also spoke with me about how her Army can help study small subgroups of the population, like lesbians and cisgender men with breast cancer, and why she thinks more research should be done on breast cancer in transgender people. The Love Research Army continues to be “committed to encouraging and facilitating breast cancer research in all people, regardless of age, race, gender, sexual identity, with or without a breast cancer diagnosis.”
A Medical Pioneer
Love was born in New Jersey and grew up in Puerto Rico and Mexico. After graduating from Fordham University in New York, she attended the State University of New York’s Downstate Medical School, graduating cum laude as one of few women in her class. She completed her surgical training at Boston’s Beth Israel Hospital, and in 1988 was recruited to found the Faulkner Breast Center at Faulkner Hospital, with a focus on comprehensive, team-based care. She was then recruited to set up what later became the Revlon UCLA Breast Center.
A founder of the breast cancer advocacy movement in the early 1990s, she helped organize the National Breast Cancer Coalition (NBCC), and later served on the boards of the NBCC and the Young Survival Coalition. In 1996, she retired from active surgery to focus on finding the cause of breast cancer.
In 1998, she earned a business degree from the Executive MBA program at UCLA’s Anderson School. She was appointed by President Clinton to the National Cancer Advisory Board, where she served from 1998 to 2004.
Dr. Susan Love’s Breast Book, first published in 1990, is widely recognized as a seminal book on breast cancer for patients and others. It will be released in its updated 7th edition this fall.
Love became medical director of the Santa Barbara Breast Cancer Institute in 1995, and the institute’s name was changed to The Susan Love MD Breast Cancer Research Foundation in 2000 and to Dr. Susan Love Foundation for Breast Cancer Research in 2004. As Founder and Chief Visionary Officer, Dr. Love built and oversaw an active research program centered on the cause and prevention of breast cancer.
In a less critical but (for Mombian readers) notable role, she also guest starred on Showtime’s The L Word in 2006, appearing as herself and offering advice to a character with breast cancer.
Love herself was diagnosed with leukemia in 2013, and died on Sunday from a recurrence of the disease.
A Pioneering Queer Parent
Love is survived by her wife, Helen Cooksey, MD, and their daughter Katie Patton-LoveCooksey and her wife, Diana Patton-LoveCooksey. Katie was born in 1988, but at the time, only Love, her gestational mother, was recognized as her legal parent. In 1993, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court in a 4-3 decision granted the women the right to jointly adopt Katie (referred to by the pseudonym “Tammy” in court documents), the first time a same-sex couple had been allowed to jointly adopt in the state.
Ten years later, Massachusetts Chief Justice Margaret H. Marshall, in the landmark Goodridge decision that made Massachusetts the first state in the nation to allow same-sex couples to marry, cited their case among others to support her statement that, “Protecting the welfare of children is a paramount State policy. Restricting marriage to opposite-sex couples, however, cannot plausibly further this policy…. Massachusetts has responded supportively to ‘the changing realities of the American family’ … and has moved vigorously to strengthen the modem family in its many variations.”
Ironically, Massachusetts now lags behind every other New England state (and several outside it) in updating its parentage laws with clear and equitable provisions that protect the children of LGBTQ parents and others regardless of the circumstances of their birth. The Massachusetts Parentage Act (MPA), which was reintroduced in February, would change this.
Many have rightly noted Love’s tremendous impact on our understanding of the causes and treatments for breast cancer. We should not forget, however, the pioneering role she and her family played in advancing legal protections for children in LGBTQ families. The Massachusetts Legislature could honor her legacy by enacting the MPA this year, 30 years after Love and Cooksey led the way in showing that, as Justice John Greaney wrote in their case, “the best interests of Tammy require legal recognition of her identical emotional relationship to both women.”
Love’s willingness to be an outspoken advocate for her family, for LGBTQ people, and for all people with breast cancer has changed innumerable lives for the better. Yet she was a spouse and a mother and I suspect it is within her family where her loss is being felt most deeply. My condolences to them and to the others who knew her best.
A memorial fund has been set up in Love’s honor. Donations will go to the Dr. Susan Love Foundation for Breast Cancer Research.
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