[DonQ]

I have said it before: The apparently statistical link is not because of the nature of therapeutic abortion but because of the lack of follow-up medical attention.

Pregnancy immediately kicks the lactating hormones into overdrive. Breastfeeding is the natural goal and expectation of all this. But in instances where the pregnancy is terminated - miscarriage, stillbirth, abortion, etc. - or the woman does not breastfeed her baby, the hormones keep the lactating features of the breasts stimulated without the natural release .... and it is apparently this unrelieved hormonal pressure that eventually triggers some breast cancers.

In many instances of miscarriage or a decision not to breastfeed, the doctors can administer other hormones that dial back the lactating mechanism. But in the case of the vast majority of elective abortions there is no such follow-up medical attention, so the lactating mechanism remains in overdrive for a prolonged period and this, from a lack of follow-up treatment for anti-lactation, is what probably leads to breast cancer.

[Jumpmaster]

Just so. I would quibble only with your term "therapeutic abortions".

[hoosierpearl]

There is more to it than that. Immature cells start to develop and never finish their development to maturity because of the premature ending of the pregnancy. Even if there is follow up care, you still have problems.
Lack of lactation is not the problem. I read the research on this and your theory wasn't in it.

[hocndoc]

The risk hasn't been found in studies of women who have miscarriages or those who give birth but do not breastfeed after birth. Evidently, miscarriage doesn't usually have the same high levels of hormones that cause the change of breast cells to those that make milk, and the cells of the breast mature sufficiently at the end of pregnancy to negate the increased risk.

I don't know of any practice of giving meds to prevent breast change after miscarriage (and I miscarried in my first trimester in the '70's) and the practice of giving meds after birth to women who don't wish to breast feed stopped some time in the late '80's, early '90's. We were giving bromocriptine when my sister and I had our children, and some still did this when I started med school in 1986, but no one was by the time I finished in 1990.

Ironically, when the possibility of ABC was first mentioned in the mid '90's (after Daling published her studies), one of the big objections was that we'd scare women who had miscarriages or that there was no history of increased breast cancer after miscarriage - often from the same objector.