Posted on 06/14/2007 8:56:50 PM PDT by monomaniac
Kansas City, KS (LifeNews.com) -- When you're a leader in the abortion industry and you generate hundreds of millions of dollars from selling abortions to women, the last thing you want to acknowledge is that abortion leads to breast cancer. And that's the problem Dr. Joel Brind described in a talk at the 35th annual National Right to Life convention.
After 50 years of research showing a link between abortion and breast cancer and Brind, a professor at Baruch College in New York, says there now is "at least as much evidence of the cover-up [of the link]as there is for the link itself."
Brind said the first study showing the abortion-breast cancer link was published in Japan in 1957 and it showed that women who have abortions have two-three times greater a chance of contracting breast cancer than those who decide to keep their baby.
Dr. Janet Daling, who considers herself pro-abortion, brought the abortion-breast cancer link into the mainstream when her 1994 research found that among women who had been pregnant at least once experienced a 50 percent increase in breast cancer risk when having an induced abortion.
Other subgroups found that women who had a family history of breast cancer experienced an 80 percent increased risk when having an abortion and teenagers saw their risk doubled if having an abortion before the age of 18 -- with all teens with a family history and an abortion getting breast cancer.
The later statistic should be considered a big public health issue because 30,000-50,000 teenagers every year with a family history of breast cancer have an abortion and all of them are likely contracting breast cancer in later years as a result.
A second part of the abortion-breast cancer link that Brind says is not contested by most researchers is that carrying a pregnancy to term results in the reduction of the breast cancer risk.
Because most breast cancers start in Type 1 and 2 lobules, units that organize breast tissue, and because induced abortions resulted in increased numbers of these lobules, abortion contributes to breast cancer. Conversely, breast cancers do not start in Type 3 ad 4 lobules and full-term pregnancies result increased numbers of Type 3 and 4 lobules, which shows a pregnancies helpfulness.
"Thus, if you have an abortion you're left with more places that breast cancers can start and if you have a full-term pregnancy you have fewer," Brind told the audience.
Brind also talked about the increase in the hormone estrogen that accompanies a pregnancy.
He said that at the end of pregnancy breasts go through a differentiation that helps counteract the effects of the estrogen, but when an abortion occurs, breasts do not go through the process and women are left at greater risk of contracting breast cancer.
As a result of the overwhelming evidence showing the abortion-breast cancer link and research showing the protective effect a pregnancy has for women, Brind said women with an unplanned pregnancy should be told that their best decision is to have the baby rather than have an abortion.
"It is always better to have a child than no pregnancy at all and it's certainly more helpful to have a child than have an abortion," he said.
Payback for abortion?
don’t mess with nature....you always have to pay the piper.
Utter nonsense which has been debunked over and over again. Brind is a professor at a third rate business college that doesn’t even offer undergraduate science majors. His “research” is far more laughable than any of the stuff Algore cites in his global-warming-is-going-to-kill-us-all hysterics, yet many FReepers are eager to jump on his bandwagon. Just goes to show that the disease of “don’t bother me with facts if they don’t promote my ideology” is epidemic all across the political spectrum.
I’m sure there are many would like to debunk this... Either the numbers support this or they do not.
“His “research” is far more laughable than any of the stuff Algore cites in his global-warming-is-going-to-kill-us-all hysterics”
How about going after his numbers instead of attacking him personally. You are behaving like a lib... I guess for you there’s no connection between AIDS and homosexuality either.
He may be a nice, well-intentioned person, but he lacks the credentials to conduct this kind of research. People who have the credentials have debunked his research (look up the work by Baylor University researchers, among many others). Anyone can cherry-pick data to assemble something that looks like it supports their thesis, and that’s exactly what he has done (just like the global warming alarmist “researchers”).
That’s actually consistent with the general observation that the fewer number of menstrual cycles a woman has in her lifetime for what ever reason (late menarche, early menopause, lots of pregnancies/babies), the lower her breast cancer risk (presumably due to lower lifetime estrogen exposure). Women who have had a lot of abortions have spent a lot of time pregnant, thus missing lots of mesntrual cycles.
“Anyone can cherry-pick data to assemble something that looks like it supports their thesis”
Seems to me that there is little to chery pick here... Either the numbers support it or they do not...
bookmark
Little to cherry pick? Brind’s research was based entirely on analyzing the results of studies done by other researchers. Maybe you should start reading the actual research, both Brind’s, and the many highly qualified researchers who have refuted his findings, and analyzing where the conflicts lie. You sound as if you’re not very familiar with how data-dependent research works.
Is the data self-reported by the study subjects? How did the researcher decide what criteria to use for inclusion vs. exclusion of various data sets (Brind included 28 previous studies and excluded 33)? Were these criteria valid? Did they skew the results of the analysis? How were other factors known to be associated with breast cancer accounted for, if at all? Was overweight considered as a separate factor, since it is known to be correlated with increased incidence of breast cancer? Maybe women who can’t remember to use contraceptives consistently, and thus find themselves needing abortions, are disproportionately likely to also lack the self-control to stop stuffing themselves. Did the analysis consider how many full term pregnancies the study subjects eventually had, before getting breast cancer? No, because many of the studies Brind analyzed didn’t include that information — maybe women who have at least one abortion statistically have fewer children altogether, because they don’t really want children, and fewer pregnancies is known to be strongly correlated with increased breast cancer risk.
Read the info at the link posted at #6. That study found that women who have had any abortions had a 16% REDUCTION in breast cancer risk, and women who had at least three abortions had a 41% REDUCTION in breast cancer risk. Unlike Brind, this researcher has the integrity to state that the study does not prove this to be an across the board fact — it’s just what one well-designed study found, and further studies with larger and more diverse study subject populations would be needed to confirm whether there is any protective effect of abortion against breast cancer (unlikely IMO). Brind, with a very poorly designed study, claims to have found conclusive proof that “abortion causes breast cancer”, while many independent groups of much more qualified researchers have found otherwise.
Bottom line is that there is simply no evidence of any causative effect of abortions on breast cancer. Even if you took records of a million women who had abortions and a million women who didn’t, and found the women who did had triple the rate of breast cancer, that wouldn’t begin to prove a CAUSATIVE relationship. There may well be factors that simultaneously predispose women to get breast cancer and have abortions (e.g. early puberty could be one such factor, since that is known to be associated with both higher incidence of breast cancer and earlier onset of sexual activity). Correlation does not equal causation. Brind’s “meta-analysis” showed only a very slightly increased risk, and given the huge flaws in his study design, it is completely insignificant — doesn’t even being to suggest a correlation, much less causation.
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