Yvette McGree Brown loves being a mother, but she wouldn’t have become one to her two adopted daughters if it were not for breast cancer.

Brown is known in Columbus as the first Black woman to be appointed to the Ohio Supreme Court and now works as a partner in the global law firm Jones Day. She first met her daughters 34 years ago and married their father a year later. Not long before, their biological mother had died of an aggressive form of breast cancer at just 41, a fate that befalls Black women at alarmingly higher rates than their racial counterparts.