[St. Johann Tetzel]

The consensus in the medical literature is that abortion does increase the incidence of breast cancer. This information is of obvious significance to women who may consider having an abortion, and their consent without it is legally deficient. Failure to diagnose breast cancer has become the most popular type of malpractice lawsuit. To save lives and guard against possible lawsuits, physicians should warn of the link prior to the operation and be vigilant looking for breast cancer in patients who have a medical history of abortion.

The costs to individuals and society from withholding or ignoring this information about abortion and breast cancer are enormous. Diagnosis and treatment of breast cancer involves far more misery for women than a diagnosis of appendicitis, for example.Yet in sharp contrast to the tobacco industry, the abortion industry pays nothing to offset the substantial costs to society of increased cancer.

[CDHart]

I wonder if the author is related to Phyllis Schlafly?

Carolyn

[FormerACLUmember]

This is massive medical malpractice on the part of the abortion industry. You can bet this never appears in any informed consent.

[GovernmentShrinker]

There is no causative link between abortion and breast cancer, period. No legitimate researcher has found even the slightest hint of such a link. The leading proponent of this hogwash, Dr. (not M.D.) Joel Brind, is a biology professor at a BUSINESS school which doesn't even offer an undergraduate science major.

As for the population-based inferences drawn by the LAWYER who wrote this article, they're as laughable as Brind's "research". It is hardly necessary to resort to speculation about abortion, to explain the rise in breast cancer in the U.S. population. There are at least three undisputed major causative factors for breast cancer which have increased greatly in the U.S. population since Roe v. Wade. One is overweight and obesity (and research has found that just a few extra pounds -- 5% above high school weight -- carries a huge increase in breast cancer incidence). The second is the trend of delayed child-bearing and bearing fewer children -- it is well-established that more pregnancies translates into lower breast cancer risk. The third is earlier puberty in girls, (widely believed to be caused by reaching a higher weight at an earlier age, but possibly also related to the increase in hormone treated meat and dairy products) -- this increase in breast cancer risk is for the same endocrinological reasons as the increase associated with fewer and later pregnancies: the more menstrual cycles a woman has in her lifetime, the higher her risk of breast cancer.

Another big hole in this "analysis" is that the combination of the increase in women's lifespan and the huge increase in routine mammogram screening, has led to the detection of early stage breast cancers that would never have been diagnosed 30 years ago, because the women would have died of something else before their breast cancer advanced far enough to be detected.

And Mr. Schlafly Esq. also leaves out a tremendously significant piece of data: THE INCIDENCE OF BREAST CANCER IN MEN HAS ALSO INCREASED DRAMATICALLY OVER THE SAME PERIOD.
http://www.asrt.org/content/News/IndustryNewsBriefs/Cancer/BreastCanc040601.aspx

Just like the "global warming" garbage, this is alarmist junk science being promulgated by people who have an agenda very different from the one their alarmism focuses attention on.

[M. Dodge Thomas]

The difficulty, of course, is that the argument is based on what's still an open question, with the current preponderance of evidence pointing toward a small or null effect independent of delaying first pregnancy:

http://www.cancer.gov/cancerinfo/ere-workshop-report

Unfortunately the sort of large scale study which would definitively settle the question is not politically viable due to fear on both sides that strongly held opinions might prove to be held in error.

As far as informed consent goes, if the primary concern is the health of a pregnant woman it appears to me that an objective unbiased warning based on the current state of knowledge and accurately reflecting the known risks would be something along the lines of:

"You need to know that if you have not yet carried a child to term, abortion increases the risk of breast cancer by delaying your first full term pregnancy, and that your increased lifetime risk of breast cancer is probably about the same as if you had delayed childbearing but not becoming pregnant at all. You also need to be aware that your risk of death in the next twelve months is lower if you have an abortion than if you elect to carry your child to term.".

Of course this would likely piss everybody off, but would at least be a candid statement of the facts as currently understood.

[aruanan]

Dozens of studies have shown that the greater the number of abortions, the higher the incidence of breast cancer.

Only for the same reason that women who have never breastfed or had children have a higher incidence of breast cancer. In other words, even if true, having had an abortion wouldn't make one more likely to develop breast cancer than a woman who had never conceived. One simply doesn't receive the protective effect of having had one's ovulatory cycle halted for a period of at least 9 months.

[Modernman]

Legally, it would be very difficult to show causation. Breast cancer develops years after abortions. So, a lawyer would have his work cut out for him if he wanted to show that an abortion 20 years ago caused a woman's breast cancer.

[soundandvision]

I love these stories... I'm waiting for this one:

"Leading scientists show that breathing air increases the chances you will one day die"

[little jeremiah]

Ping to me for later pingout.

[gcruse]

That Baptist college, Baylor University did studies showing no link between breast cancer and abortion.

There is something unseemly about 'Christians' rooting for breast cancer.

[Antoninus]

Ping.