Carcinogens and the Abortion-Breast Cancer Link (Hint: Abortion Does Cause Breast Cancer)

Coalition on Abortion/Breast Cancer ^ | May 20, 2003 | Karen Malec

[DaGman]

More junk science. I'll believe this when they show a connection between pregnacy and breast cancer. Until then, its nothing but junk science based on religious beliefs, IMHO.

[anniegetyourgun]

The only folks politicizing this issue are from the abortion industry who wish to keep women uninformed.

[HairOfTheDog]

It only makes my heart and mind wonder why they are reaching for some abstract reason to not have an abortion, when the baby is obviously the single most important issue, for both the woman, and the pro-lifer.

Every woman over 40 in my family got breast cancer and I most likely will too. All lived through it, though a few got other cancers later. For people to isolate one cause in a vacuum and not pretend that there are a multitude reasons people get breast cancer, and a myriad of other priorities, fears and decisions going on in the mind of a person considering abortion; realities that are much more 'here and now' than some future risk of breast cancer. It doesn't even register on the radar.

[Coleus]

We've had 118 "saves" this past year at an abortion clinic touting the health risks associated with the procedure including: breast cancer links, infertility, death, bleeding, infections, etc.

It's a tool, there is nothing "made up" which is used to save children from death and it works.

What arguments do you use?

[VeritatisSplendor]

More junk science. I'll believe this when they show a connection between pregnacy and breast cancer. Until then, its nothing but junk science based on religious beliefs, IMHO.

Didn't you READ? It isn't pregnancy that causes the increased risk of breast cancer, it's the INTERRUPTION of pregnancy. Saying you won't believe there's a connection between abortion and breast cancer until they establish a connection between pregnancy and breast cancer is just silly -- normal pregnancies are PROTECTIVE against breast cancer because of the changes in breast tissue that occur during the third trimester of pregnancy.

The logic of your comment is akin to that in "I won't believe there's a connection between drunk driving and increased risk of death until someone shows there's a connection between alcohol consumption and increased risk of death".

[mabelkitty]

I've always considered this my personal "tin foil beanie" conspiracy for several years now.

It just makes perfect sense.

[mabelkitty]

The breasts experience dramatic changes during pregnancy. Just because you can't notice it with the human eye does not mean it is taking place.

To abruptly rip a healthy fetus and interrupt a healthy pregnancy of course would have a devastating affect on the body.

When a fetus is preparing itself for miscarriage, the body makes the changes for the sad event. Talk to any woman who has had one, and she will tell you that somehow she "just knew" it was going to happen.

[Alamo-Girl]

Thanks for the heads up!

[jlogajan]

We've had 118 "saves" this past year at an abortion clinic touting the health risks associated with the procedure including: breast cancer links, infertility, death, bleeding, infections, etc.

It's a tool, there is nothing "made up" which is used to save children from death and it works.

Of course lies work. They're still lies. The maternal mortality rate for full term deliveries is EIGHT times higher than the case mortality rate for induced abortion.

So your little lies are convincing women to increase their chances of death by 800%. Liar.

[MrLeRoy]

Women who abort and kill their babies do not have a higher rate of breast cancer than women who have never been pregnant

Provide evidence for your claim.

[jlogajan]

Women who abort and kill their babies do not have a higher rate of breast cancer than women who have never been pregnant

Provide evidence for your claim.

The Denmark study, largest of its kind, studied millions of women's health records and found no link between abortion and breast cancer. This study eliminated "recall bias" in which healthy women tend to not report having had abortions. "Recall bias" screwed up all the earlier studies that claimed to have found a link between breast cancer and abortion. Once recall bias was eliminated, the link disappeared.

[nickcarraway]

BUMP

[Coleus]

Your stats are made up, talk about lying.

[WilliamWallace1999]

"I know for a fact doing sidewalk counseling that the health risks to women associated with abortion have led to a number of "saves". "


How about the truth. That God loves that baby and the woman too. Abortion is the taking of a human life. That all life is sacred and must be protected. That it is a child not a choice.

I applaud and thank you for your effort to save the unborn children. As a Catholic, I agree with you. As a pro-life Board Certified Ob/Gyn, I just can't let scientific half-truths go unchallenged. Medical research today is full of bullshit artists that spin data to meet an agenda. Hypothesis must pass statistical analytical muster or they are only propaganda and will ultimately undermine the credibility of the cause.

[MrLeRoy]

The Denmark study, largest of its kind, studied millions of women's health records and found no link between abortion and breast cancer. This study eliminated "recall bias" in which healthy women tend to not report having had abortions.

"from what I could gather from Dr. Melbye's update of his Danish data (during the question and answer session), his stratification of relative risk by age in 1973 (date of inception of his abortion registry) was not accomplished by restricting the initial analysis to different sub-cohorts. For example, he did not reanalyze the data from scratch using only women born since 1950 (instead of 1935), thus eliminating most of the misclassified women from the analysis. Rather, he applied a statistical adjustment to the initial analysis of the entire cohort. Consequently, the large distortion of the relative risk estimate in the direction of underestimation, which we have pointed out (Brind and Chinchilli, 1997), still applies." - "Early Reproductive Events and Breast Cancer: A Minority Report," Joel Brind, Ph.D., Professor, Human Biology and Endocrinology, Baruch College-CUNY

[WilliamWallace1999]

Actually, you and the other proponents of this theory are the one's required to statistically provide the evidence. I was proposing the null hypothesis to your hypothesis. The burden of proof in research is on the party making the claim of causation in response to a statistical linkage. Equating correlation with causation is one of the oldest mistakes in research. It is avoided by forming a null hypothesis and then failing to refute it. If efforts to refute the null hypothesis succeed, then the presumption is that the theorem is correct.

[MrLeRoy]

Women who abort and kill their babies do not have a higher rate of breast cancer than women who have never been pregnant

Provide evidence for your claim.

I was proposing the null hypothesis to your hypothesis.

You didn't "propose" it but stated it as established fact. Thanks for clarifying your meaning.

[Coleus]

As a pro-life Board Certified Ob/Gyn>>>>

So tell me more. The is no correlation at all? Where can I get the facts? I've been trying to get them.

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/864260/posts?page=4#4

[WilliamWallace1999]

http://www.cancer.org/docroot/CRI/content/CRI_2_6x_Can_Having_an_Abortion_Cause_or_Contribute_to_Breast_Cancer.asp?sitearea=

Can Having an Abortion Cause or Contribute to Breast Cancer?

Research studies have not found a cause-and-effect relationship between breast cancer and abortion. There are different types of abortion:

Induced abortion is probably what most people consider "abortion," in that a woman chooses to end a pregnancy.
Spontaneous abortion, which most people refer to as a miscarriage, also causes the interruption of hormones. It is this interruption which is believed to increase ones' risk of developing breast cancer.
Stillborn births, in which the fetus dies after five months gestation while still in the uterus, may cause hormonal fluctuations in the mother that are abnormal when compared to a normal, full-term pregnancy.
All of these situations have been studied to see what effect they may have on the woman's risk of developing breast cancer later in life. No link has been found between breast cancer and miscarriage or stillbirths. The research is not quite so clear with induced abortions and breast cancer.

Before 1973, induced abortions were illegal in the United States, except in some states. Therefore, when researchers ask about a woman's reproductive past, women may be not want to disclose the fact that they have had an illegal abortion. Even though abortion is now legal, it is still a very personal, private matter that many women are hesitant to talk about. Studies have shown that healthy women are less likely to report their histories of induced abortions. In contrast, women with breast cancer are more likely to accurately report their reproductive histories because they are literally searching their memories for anything that may have contributed to their disease.

The likelihood that women who have breast cancer will give a more complete account of their abortions than women who do not have breast cancer is called "recall bias" and it can seriously undermine the accuracy of study results.

Most early studies of abortion and breast cancer used a case-control study design, one that is very prone to recall bias. In these studies,women with and without breast cancer were asked to report past abortions and the frequency of abortions in women with breast cancer and the disease-free controls was compared. It is likely that the small increases in breast cancer risk observed in many of these studies were not authentic findings because of recall bias.

A prospective study design is stronger and less prone to bias. In this type of study a population of women who are cancer-free are asked about their past abortions and then observed to see if a new cancer occurs In this type of study, there is no chance that having the disease will influence a woman’s memory of past abortions or willingness to report past abortions.

Some prospective studies have solved the problem of recall bias by using innovative ways to document induced abortions. For example, a recent study used birth certificates of children born to women with breast cancer to identify women who had had induced abortions (the number of previous pregnancies and their outcomes were listed on these birth certificates). This study found no increase in breast cancer risk in women whose abortion is followed by a live birth.

The largest, and probably the most reliable, study of this topic was conducted recently in Denmark. In that study, all Danish women born between 1935 and 1978 (1.5 million women) were linked with The National Registry of Induced Abortions and with the Danish Cancer Registry. So, all information about their abortions and their breast cancer came from registries, was very complete, and was not influenced by recall bias. After adjusting for known breast cancer risk factors, the researchers found that induced abortion(s) had no overall effect on the risk of breast cancer. In this very large group of women, 1,338 cases of breast cancer occurred in women who had terminated pregnancies. The size of this study and the manner in which it was conducted provides substantial evidence that induced abortion does not affect a woman's risk of developing breast cancer.

There are other, smaller studies pointing to the fact that abortion does not cause, nor contribute to, the development of breast cancer.

The topic of abortion and breast cancer highlights many of the most challenging aspects of epidemiologic studies of human populations and how those studies do or do not translate into public health guidelines. The issue of abortion generates passionate personal and political viewpoints, regardless of any possible disease connection. Breast cancer is the second most common cancer in women, and it can be a life-threatening disease that most women fear. Still, the public is not well-served by false alarms, even with both the exposure and the disease are of great importance and interest to us all. At the present time, the scientific evidence does not support a causal association between induced abortion and breast cancer.

[MrLeRoy]

Women who abort and kill their babies do not have a higher rate of breast cancer than women who have never been pregnant, that is the control group. You can't use knocked up teen moms having babies on Medicaid, soaking up foodstamps, and eating govenment cheese as the control group.

Do food stamps and government cheese protect against breast cancer? If not, why bring them up?