"My mom would have given up every part of her body to be here for me, to watch me in the pageant."

"If there's something that I can do to be proactive, it might hurt my body, it might hurt my physical beauty, but I'm going to be alive."

After the Miss America pageant, contestant Allyn Rose will have a pre-emptive double mastectomy:

Rose said it was her father who first broached the subject, during her freshman year of college, two years after the death of her mother.

"I said, 'Dad I'm not going to do that. I like the body I have.' He got serious and said, 'Well then you're going to end up dead like your mom.'"