The Rise of the Teenage Breast Reduction

I was sitting topless on crinkly paper in a room with white walls and toothpaste-green privacy curtains hanging from the ceiling to separate the hospital beds. “Women pay thousands of dollars for breasts like these,” the plastic surgeon told me. Were doctors supposed to say that? I didn’t think so, but it didn’t matter. In a few hours, he would be carefully, meticulously making incisions along the anchor-shaped lines he’d drawn on my breasts. I was 18 and getting a breast reduction, or medically, a reduction mammoplasty.

Together, my 34DDs weighed in at more than four pounds, a heavy burden for my five-foot-one frame. I knew long before I decided on surgery that I wasn’t built to carry around that much weight. And my body reminded me of that fact every day—with neck aches so painful I couldn’t turn my head; with the deep grooves my bra straps made in my aching shoulders; with the chafed skin that sports bras left under my bouncing breasts, raw skin stinging before scabbing over.

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