The Breast Cancer Awareness Half Dollar

Roughly one in eight American women will be diagnosed with breast cancer in her lifetime. In the 2010s Congress decided to put that fight on a coin — and the road to doing it turned out to be surprisingly hard.

Representatives Carolyn Maloney of New York and Pete Sessions of Texas introduced the Breast Cancer Awareness Commemorative Coin Act on June 10, 2015. The House passed it on July 15, 2015, the Senate followed on April 19, 2016, and President Obama signed it into law on April 29, 2016 (Public Law 114-148). It authorized a three-coin program: a $5 gold piece, a silver dollar, and the clad half dollar described here.

But the bill stalled along the way. As originally written, the surcharge — the extra dollars added to each coin's price and routed to charity — was to be split between two groups: the Breast Cancer Research Foundation and Susan G. Komen. A faction of House Republicans objected to sending federal coin proceeds to Komen because of Komen's grants to Planned Parenthood, and the vote was pulled. The compromise that finally passed dropped Komen entirely. All net surcharges from the program — $5 from every half dollar, plus $10 per silver dollar and $35 per gold coin — were directed to the Breast Cancer Research Foundation in New York. That is the whole reason the coin sold above face value: you weren't buying fifty cents of metal, you were buying a donation with a coin attached.

The artist behind the coin was Emily Damstra, a science illustrator and member of the Mint's Artistic Infusion Program (a pool of outside artists who submit designs). She won an open national competition for the program — and her central choice shaped everything. A breast-cancer coin, she decided, "should focus on the people affected by it rather than an impersonal image of the cancer itself or the body parts involved."

The obverse — the heads side — shows two women side by side. An older woman clasps her hands to her chest with a look of relief; a younger woman, a scarf wrapped over her head, holds one hand to her chest and raises the other in a fist, ready to fight. A butterfly flies above them. To get the feeling right, Damstra posed her own sister and niece as models, then altered their features enough that the figures wouldn't resemble any real person. The reverse — the tails side — carries a single image: a Tiger Swallowtail butterfly in flight, chosen as a symbol of hope. Damstra picked that species deliberately — it lives across most of the continental United States, so it would be familiar — and she rendered it alive and in motion, not pinned like a specimen.

The same Damstra designs appear across all three coins in the program. On the half dollar the engraving work was split between two of the Mint's own sculptor-engravers: Phebe Hemphill sculpted the obverse and Renata Gordon the reverse. The headline of the whole program belonged to the gold coin, though — to make it visually "pink," the Mint alloyed it as 75% gold, 21% silver, and 4% copper, producing the first pink-hued gold coin in U.S. history. The half dollar shares none of that exotic metal. It is ordinary copper-nickel clad — a copper-nickel skin over a pure-copper core, the same recipe as the half dollars in everyday circulation — which is exactly what made it the affordable way into the program.

This is a modern commemorative, so the appeal isn't ancient rarity — it's the gap between how many the Mint was allowed to make and how few it actually sold. Congress authorized up to 750,000 half dollars. The public bought a small fraction of that: roughly 22,392 Proof half dollars (struck at San Francisco, with an "S" mint mark) and about 11,301 Uncirculated half dollars (struck at Denver, with a "D" mint mark). A few definitions help here: a proof is a specially polished collector strike with mirror-like fields; an uncirculated coin is a regular strike made for collectors but in normal finish; the mint mark is the small letter naming the facility that struck the coin.

Those modest numbers are the story. The half dollar was the cheapest coin in the program, so it competed for buyers' dollars with the silver dollar and the pink gold piece — and many collectors who could only buy one went for the gold. That left the clad half with one of the smaller mintages of any modern U.S. commemorative half dollar.

For collectors today the practical play is condition. Because these were sold directly by the Mint in capsules, finding a high-grade example isn't the hard part — most survive in pristine shape. The premiums attach to the very top grades and to the deep-mirror, sharply-struck proofs, where third-party grading separates an ordinary "gem" from a near-perfect one. It is also one piece of a tidy three-coin set; collectors who want the program complete need the half dollar, the silver dollar, and the gold $5 together.