To raise awareness of breast reconstruction and to market it to patients, the American Society of Plastic Surgeons has adopted the vocabulary of the movement to support a woman’s freedom to choose an abortion, adjusting it for women with breast cancer. Although women “don’t choose their diagnosis, they can choose to go ahead with reconstruction or not, and with the aid of a knowledgeable plastic surgeon they can choose what their options might be,” Dr. Linda G. Phillips, a plastic surgeon in Galveston, Tex., said in a telephone news conference organized by the plastic surgery society to mark Breast Cancer Awareness Month in October. “Then they have that much more power over their lives if they have that power to choose.”

But for many patients, the options may be limited because their doctors are not proficient in the latest procedures. Dr. Michael F. McGuire, the president-elect of the American Society of Plastic Surgeons, said it is not unusual for surgeons to omit telling patients about operations they do not perform. He compared the rise of more complex breast reconstruction to the advent in the late 1980s of minimally invasive laparoscopic surgery of the gallbladder.

“At the time, only a small percentage of surgeons were doing them and doing them well,” said Dr. McGuire, who is chief of plastic surgery at St. Johns Hospital in Santa Monica, Calif. “If you were not familiar with laparoscopic gallbladder surgery, you were still doing it the traditional way with an open great big scar across the abdomen.”

Uneven information about reconstructive options is a subset of a larger problem, said Dr. Amy K. Alderman, an assistant professor of plastic surgery at the University of Michigan Medical School in Ann Arbor. Only one third of women undergoing operations for breast cancer said their general surgeons had discussed reconstruction at all, according to a study by Dr. Alderman of 1,844 women in Los Angeles and Detroit that was published in February in the journal Cancer.

“In the big picture, it would be great if we could just get doctors to tell people they have an option of reconstruction,” Dr. Alderman said.

Once patients are so informed, she added, plastic surgeons should tell them of options beyond implants. “The next hurdle would be letting them know that using their own tissue is an option, because my guess is that they are not even getting that far in the discussion,” Dr. Alderman said.

About 66,000 women in the United States had mastectomies in 2006, the latest figures available, according to the federal government. And about 57,000 women had reconstructive breast surgery last year, according to estimates from the plastic surgery society.