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Abortion and Breast Cancer: An Obvious Link
 If one simply considers the millions of racing developments involved within the womb of a pregnant woman, abortion is much like a speeding car hitting a brick wall. While a miscarriage is triggered and conducted by the body's mechanisms, induced abortion is an unplanned shock to the system.
Levels of the female sex hormone (estrogen) rise sharply during the first trimester of pregnancy. In fact, estrogen levels rise twenty-fold during the first half of pregnancy. This surge in estrogen stimulates cells in the mother's breasts, including potentially cancerous cells, to grow rapidly.
In a pregnancy carried to term, other hormones subsequently induce these immature cells to differentiate into mature, milk producing cells. Carrying to term completes the process of radical change within a woman's body, allowing the body to naturally finish what it began, to take hormone levels to a normal state. Abortion harshly interrupts the body's return to a normal, healthy state.
A LACK OF ADVOCACY
It would seem that advocates for women's issues would embrace the discovery of a major cause of breast cancer and spread the word to reduce the risk of the disease. However, since breast cancer research could negatively affect the abortion industry, groups such as NOW and Planned Parenthood dismiss the research.
How can anyone claim to be pro-woman, and still leave women at risk for breast cancer? Is money that important? Planned Parenthood makes over $40 million a year on abortion, and apparently the windfall cuts into the concern for women's health. In fact, abortion rights activists exiled Dr. Janet Daling, who is pro-choice, after she found a connection between breast cancer and abortion.
Breast cancer strikes around 180,000 women each year. GRTL’s advocacy for women demands that we put this issue at the forefront. If a procedure can double a woman's chances of having breast cancer, she has the right to know, thus the Women’s Right to Know legislation.
RECENT DEVELOPMENTS
Despite years of studies affirming a link between abortion and breast cancer, a recent Danish study has resulted in some pro-abortion sources to claim this link to be false. However, there is a very basic flaw in this study conducted by Dr. Mads Melbye. For the duration of 20 years, Dr. Melbye studied mothers who carried to term, while in contrast, he only studied the mothers who had abortions for the duration of less than 10 years. This flaw corrupts the study in a very obvious way: the numbers are higher for the group followed into midlife because breast cancer generally doesn't afflict women until close to midlife years anyway. Before age 30, the incidence rate for breast cancer is 1 in -2,525. By age 45, the rate is 1 in 93.
If you stop charting a woman's progress before her midlife years, it is obvious that you won't encounter significant occurrences of breast cancer! Dr. Melbye did this with the "abortion" half of his study, showing these women to have a low prevalence of risk.
However, he continued to chart the "non-abortion" side as they entered the years of greatest risk for breast cancer. This artificially raises the prevalence of breast cancer, among the "non-abortive."
And oddly, just a decade ago, a previous Danish study (with some of the same women) found a 191 percent increased risk of breast cancer, among women who had an induced abortions.
STUDIES THAT FIND A LINK
- Three months before Melbye found "no relationship" between abortion and breast cancer, the British Medical Association had concluded just the opposite, basing its conclusion on 28 different studies.
- In November 1994, Dr. Janet Dalin of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, found a 50% increased risk of cancer, in subjects who had undergone abortion.
- Joel Brind professor of biology and endocrinology at Baruch College of the City University of New York compiled almost every cancer-risk study taken since 1957. His conclusion: breast cancer risk is30 percent higher for women who have had induced abortions.
- The journal of the National Cancer Institute published a l996 study by two Danish researchers; involving 918 Dutch women, which concluded the following: "A history of induced abortion was associated with a 90 percent increased risk for breast cancer." The researchers found no such association among women who had given birth.
Schematic representation of tissue structure of:
a. Mature breast of a never-pregnant woman
b. Breast at end of full-term pregnancy |
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