While Gabrielle Union may be a beautiful actress who is often seen jet setting with her superstar NBA boyfriend Dwayne Wade she is also very active in her community and stays in the forefront of women’s health issues.

Union’s best friend Kristen Martinez was diagnosed with stage 4 metastasized breast cancer when she was 32 years old and died five years later.  In her memory Gabrielle has become a loud advocate for breast cancer awareness and early screening. 

“Today, her memory is the driving force behind my commitment to increase awareness about breast cancer, especially among young women and women of color,” Union writes on the Huffington Post.

She shares the scary facts that more than 11,000 out of the 250,000 that get diagnosed with breast cancer every year in the U.S. are under the age of 40. In addition, Black women of color have the highest incidence of breast cancer with the lowest survival rates.

“Too many women don’t get breast exams or follow-up on abnormalities, usually because they can’t afford it or they are afraid of what they’ll learn. We have to make it easier for women of all ages to get the breast care they need.”

To help with this mission, Union and Planned Parenthood announced the organization’s expansion of services for more breast exams, education and specialized services that will provide affordable care for young and low-income women. The Affordable Care Act, which went into effect August 1, also removes co-pays and deductibles from the equation when a woman goes in for breast exams and mammograms.

Being the advocate that she is and also a rape survivor Gabrielle was outraged over Republican Missouri Representative Todd Akin’s comments about “legitimate rape.” The idiotic senatorial candidate actually said that women’s bodies have a mechanism for preventing pregnancy if they are a victim of rape. As such, he believes that no exception should be made to allow women to have abortions even in cases of rape and incest.    

Todd said KTVI news:

“First of all, from what I understand from doctors [pregnancy from rape] is really rare,” Todd said in a report aired Sunday. “If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut the whole thing down.”

WHAT??? Flabbergasted??? Yeah, me too. Am I being silly for wondering how these people actually get voted into office??

Since Sunday, Todd has retracted his statement and claimed that he actually misspoke, but the damage has already been done on the social media landscape.

Act Like a Lady Think like a man star Gabrielle Union too was flabbergasted after getting word of Todd’s unwitting comments.

“I was shocked and I would say saddened, except it pissed me off. So I shot Todd a little Twitter message today explaining kindly—though I didn’t realize there was a need to—that all rape, Todd, is legitimate,” she said during a roundtable discussion on MSNBC.

“Every rape victim should have equal access to services and  health care,” Gabrielle argued. I believe all women should have access to quality health care and preventive services.”

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