Wanda Bruce, a 50-year-old Virginia woman who had silicone breast implants after losing both breasts to cancer last spring, recently had the chance to comment on the risks of implants. "I am a gambler," she said. "I'd rather have quality of life than quantity. Not that I think implants will take my life, but I am almost at that point that I'd have them anyway."

Lynn Carter, a North Carolina woman, didn't have breast cancer but felt her need for implants also was great. "I'm 5 feet 9, I wear a size 12 and I wore a size A bra," she told The New York Times. "You know, it means so much for a woman not to be small, not to feel disfigured because God didn't make her enormous."

Last week, an advisory panel of experts convened by the federal Food and Drug Administration was asked to decide which of these women should be deprived of the option to have this surgery. Despite clear evidence that silicone implants carry significant risks, the panel made the surprising decision to treat American women as competent grownups capable of choosing for themselves what hazards to brave. Even though the panel had voted just the day before that implant manufacturers hadn't demonstrated the safety of these devices, its members voted 10-0 to recommend that they be left on the market.