The same issues bedevil prostate cancer screening.
But since screening has been framed as caring for women, pointing out the flaws with screening is automatically seen as hating women.
While Reagan did a lot to try to defund cancer research regardless, the first lady's mastectomy drew a lot of attention to a previously taboo topic.
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/1985/07/16/us/reagan-s-illness-medic... [1] https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1987-10-18-mn-15261-...
Back when I was a life scientist the best advice I got was to work on diseases the family members of congresspeople had.
This is not a "weird relationship" thing, rather women got organized and: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breast_cancer_awareness
It’s more broad than that, it’s the relationship with women’s health as a whole.
If you're really interested, watch some older Dutch movies to see the normalness of naked, like Turkish Delight [0]. Or even have a closer look at the relation between the Professor and Raquel in the recent Casa the Papel. It's different from US series. More respectful, mature wrt women if you ask me. More emphasis on intelligence. Or on a beautiful woman in her 40s with normal wrinkles. The US, like on many other topics, seems to be polarized, caught between the hyper sexuality of Cardi B and the prude nature of American culture in general.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turkish_Delight_(1973_film)
Fixed that for you.
So our best shot from a public health perspective is to say "Here's what we recommend for everybody" and pay for that.
All screening programmes have two difficulties, which must be balanced against the benefit, and this trade is somewhat personal, so when the balance is quite fine the arguments can be vociferous as a result.
1. The screening itself may seem unpleasant. One woman may find it a very mild annoyance, a drive ten minutes out of her way, the staff are very pleasant, the scan itself is far less traumatic than a bra fitting, and she receives easy to understand results after not very long and isn't anxious about them; but for another maybe it's an hour's bus journey to the city hospital, the staff there are short-tempered and say she has the wrong paperwork, then another hour in a queue, she feels like she's just meat, squashed around for the convenience of the machine for what seems like forever, and then after anxiously waiting for what seems to be too long the results are confusing to her and she has to have a friend interpret them.
2. Over-treatment is always a problem. Screening by definition detects something that isn't causing noticeable symptoms. If you have a noticeable lump, or mysterious bleeding, you don't need screening you need a doctor's appointment. So a positive screening result might be nothing important. However either you've now got the burden of a diagnosis you ignored or, you accept the medical advice and are treated, even though it's possible (not likely, but possible) that you would have been just fine without treatment.
So, screening programmes are set up based on guessing how to trade these factors plus a third, how much should we spend on this medical intervention? After all, in some sense every dollar doing breast cancer screening is a dollar you don't have to cure blindness in poor orphans (or of course, to bomb somewhere)
If your experience of a screening programme is that it's a minor inconvenience at most, and yet you know people who died of undetected disease, more screening seems like a no brainer. Particularly if you live somewhere where screening stops at age 50, and somebody you know died of undetected disease aged 54, you might reason that the screening should go to age 55 or 60 to detect such cases, no matter the public cost.
On the other hand if your experience is that it's an awful ordeal even when negative, and you know people who spent their last years horribly scarred by surgery as a result of suspected disease but then they died in their sleep from something else anyway, you may feel that there's already too much screening and it should be trimmed back, not to save money but the extra money for other programmes is welcome.
I certainly don't worry about the cancer I could develop as a result of an xray in a regular dental cleaning (even though that's a possibility).
However if you are a doctor trying to figure out how often to screen women, the danger if xrays is a strong reason to not do it too often. Daily screenings would catch breast cancer a lot sooner on average, but just isn't worth the risk even if the screening was otherwise free.
You may want to consider finding a different medical professional!