Smoking only put bad things in your lungs. Abortion is like running a car into a brick wall.
Once a young girl is pregnant, there are changes in the body, and hormones released. The breasts are pushed into development as a biological clock is started -- the child will need nourishment in 9 months.
The studies have proven the younger the girl, the effects are more devastating.
The running of a car into the brick wall is the sudden stoppage of the hormones and the development of the breast -- the effect of having an abortion.
The good news is that people who do not have a history of breast cancer in the family are fairly safe.
And the other good news is that if a very young girl goes ahead with giving birth to the child, subsequent pregnancies ending in abortion are not as likely to cause breast cancer (i.e., the breasts were developed as part of the first pregnancy fully).
As for lung cancer and throat cancer from smoking, some people do not have a problem unless there is a family history of cancer.
So there are variables.
A New Jersey breast surgeon became very alarmed with all the young women that came to her with breast cancer. She is now full time on the abortion-breast cancer link because she had too many victims enter her office (25 to 35 year old women).
At least when people smoked, they might get cancer in their 40's or 50's. It appears with the abortion-breast cancer link, that dying of breast cancer can happen when a woman is in her 20's -- especially if she had an abortion around the age of 10, 11, 12, or 13 years old -- which is not UNCOMMON in this day and age.
Abortion-Breast Cancer Link is Convincingby Dr. Angela Lanfranchi
[Source: The Age (Australia); February 16, 2003]
[Pro-Life Infonet Note: Dr Angela Lanfranchi is a breast cancer surgeon, a fellow of the American College of Surgeons and clinical assistant professor of surgery at the Robert Wood Johnson Medical School in New Jersey.]
When I first heard of the link between abortion and breast cancer, in 1993, I thought it was a pro-life fantasy. "That’s crazy," was my initial response. However, out of curiosity I changed the history form I used in my work as a breast surgeon, asking each woman the order and outcome of all pregnancies. The results surprised me.
In the first six months I had two patients in their 30s with breast cancer; one had had seven pregnancies and six abortions, the other five pregnancies and three abortions. I continued to see more and more young women with a history of abortion, developing breast cancer. Of course, I may have been witnessing a statistical fluke.
But then, in 1996, City University of New York Professor Joel Brind published his meta-analysis, which revealed 23 of 28 studies showing a link between abortion and breast cancer. The uproar that study caused in Britain, where it was published in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health, prompted the editor to write: "I believe that if you take a view (as I do) which is pro-choice, you need at the same time to have a view which might be called pro-information without excessive paternalistic censorship (or interpretation) of the data."
Paternalistic censorship is what I experience every time I try to speak on the science supporting the abortion-breast cancer link.
About 85 per cent of cigarette smokers do not get lung cancer. Doctors who tell their patients of the risk of lung cancer are not labelled fear-mongers. Similarly, not all women who have had an abortion will get breast cancer; only 5 per cent will develop the disease. And 95 per cent of breast cancer patients will not have a history of abortion. But some women are at especially high risk. And 5 percent still adds up to a lot of women.
The 1994 Daling study published in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute showed that teenagers younger than 18 who had abortions between nine and 24 weeks had nearly a 30 per cent chance of getting breast cancer in their lifetimes. The US National Cancer Institute’s web page on reproductive risk informs women there are studies that show this link.
Many people ask me about first trimester miscarriage. This is quite different, in its effect on the woman’s breasts, from induced abortion of a normal pregnancy. Miscarriages do not increase breast cancer risk, since they are associated with low oestrogen levels that do not cause breast growth. However, when pregnancy is terminated before the breast cells reach full maturity, a woman is left with more immature type 1 and 2 breast lobules (milk glands) than before her pregnancy started, and therefore is at increased risk. Her breasts never mature to type 3 and 4 lobules, which would have occurred in the third trimester and would have lowered her risk.
Ideology should not prevent the dissemination of this information. Australia’s breast cancer organisations are not helping women exercise informed consent when they deny them this knowledge. There are three legal actions in the US by women who were not told of the link before having an abortion.
As Dr Janet Daling, who identifies herself as being pro-choice, says: "If politics gets involved in science, it will really hold back the progress we make. I have three sisters with breast cancer, and I resent people messing with the scientific data to further their own agenda, be they pro-choice or pro-life. I would have loved to have found no association between breast cancer and abortion, but our research is rock solid, and our data is accurate. It’s not a matter of believing. It’s a matter of what is."
Information only empowers women to make informed choices. Women who choose abortions need to be aware that they are at higher risk, so they will have mammograms earlier and more regularly. Cancers found on mammograms are more likely to be stage 1 and curable. No woman should die of breast cancer because she was not warned.
I watched my mother die of metastatic breast cancer. In my practice, I see young women with small children die of breast cancer. If the information I give patients can prevent a single death from a completely avoidable risk, I will gladly pay the price of being labelled a fear-monger.
These women have experience with this, and though one [Dr Janet Daling] identifies herself as pro-choice, both are interested in helping women.
I believe Angela Lanfranchi, M.D., has left the practice in New Jersey to try to make people aware of the link. It is too late to try to cure the patient when they already have breast cancer -- easier to make the facts known BEFORE women/girls have abortions. And Dr. Lanfranchi has testified before state legislatures about informed consent laws on abortion.