The 2018 Breast Cancer Awareness Silver Dollar

Most U.S. commemorative coins honor a person, a place, or an anniversary. This one honored a fight — and the people still in it.

The Breast Cancer Awareness Commemorative Coin Act became law on April 29, 2016 (Public Law 114-148). It told the Mint to strike three coins for a single year, 2018: a five-dollar gold piece, this silver dollar, and a clad half dollar. Each one carried a built-in surcharge — $10 on every silver dollar — paid to the Breast Cancer Research Foundation in New York to fund research. That is the quiet engine inside every modern U.S. commemorative: you are not just buying a coin, you are routing money to a cause Congress chose.

The program is best remembered for the gold coin, which the law required to be alloyed with extra copper. The result was a faint pink blush — the first "pink gold" coin in the Mint's history. The silver dollar didn't share that trick. What it shared was the design, and the design is the reason this coin is worth a second look.

Turn the coin to its obverse — the heads side — and you won't find a president or a personification of Liberty. You'll find two women.

An older woman rests her hands on her chest, her face relieved. A younger woman wears a scarf over her head — the quiet signal of chemotherapy — with one hand on her own chest and the other raised in a fist. One has come through. One is still fighting. Between them and above, a butterfly. The artist, Emily Damstra of the Mint's Artistic Infusion Program, won an open design competition for the obverse, and her two-generations idea carried across the whole program — the same imagery appears on the gold, silver, and half dollar.

The reverse — the tails side — drops the eagle that usually rules American coinage and gives the whole field to a single Tiger Swallowtail butterfly in flight, a symbol of hope. It's a striking break from convention: a U.S. legal-tender dollar with no eagle anywhere on it. Damstra's obverse was given its three-dimensional form by Mint medallic sculptor Phebe Hemphill; the butterfly reverse was sculpted by Renata Gordon. (A small piece of craft vocabulary: the sculptor turns a flat drawing into the modeled relief the dies are made from — the artist draws it, the sculptor gives it depth.)

Here's the fact that surprises people: Congress authorized up to 400,000 of these silver dollars, and the Mint sold nowhere near that. Reported figures put the uncirculated coin at 12,526 struck and the proof at roughly 34,500 — together a small fraction of the cap. That gap matters. The ceiling Congress sets is a maximum, not a forecast, and modern commemoratives routinely sell a sliver of it. The real number is the actual mintage, and for the uncirculated 2018 Breast Cancer dollar that real number is genuinely low for a modern issue.

Two finishes exist, both struck at Philadelphia and carrying the "P" mint mark. The proof — struck twice from polished dies on a polished blank, for mirror fields and frosted devices — was the bigger seller and is the more common of the two. The uncirculated (the Mint calls it the "uncirculated" or business-strike finish) is the scarcer coin by a wide margin.

For a coin this recent and this well cared for, condition is the whole game. These came from the Mint sealed; survivors in top certified grades — a flawless MS70 or PF70 — command a premium over the same coin a point lower. Because almost none entered circulation, wear isn't the issue; the difference between grades is the difference between a near-perfect strike and a perfect one.