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Countries don’t get breast cancer, women do. Unless the breast cancer in these countries afflicts women who’ve had abortions disproportionately - a point which the report seems to evade making - the most we have here is evidence of some cultural factor leading to both abortions and breast cancer.

Unless the breast cancer in these countries afflicts women who’ve had abortions disproportionately - a point which the report seems to evade making - the most we have here is evidence of some cultural factor leading to both abortions and breast cancer.

The report indeed did not directly examine this question:

http://www.jpands.org/vol12no3/carroll.pdf

Countries don’t get breast cancer, women do.

Good point. I read the abstract and for this reason and others, I found its logic and hypothesis rather faulty.

First of all Patrick Carroll is statistician, not a medical researcher. That’s not to say he’s completely wrong and abortion could very well be a risk factor for breast cancer but he took the abortion rates of some Western European countries and the rates of breast cancer of those same countries and made some rather broad assumptions based on what he saw as parallels in those two statistics. He took some trends and is making predictions on those trends without quantifying how the data will confirm those predictions. According to this study, if for instance the abortion rate among women is 50% and the incident of breast cancer is also 50% then abortion is the cause and 100% of the women who had abortions should get breast cancer. It’s a meaningless statistic unless you can make a direct correlation of the incidence of breast cancer of women who had abortions vs. those who did not and factor in other causes.

What he didn’t look at was the history of women who actually developed breast cancer and whether or not they had any abortions and that would be key.

His study didn’t account for other known risk factors. I would like to know for instance if countries with higher abortion rates also had higher occurrences of other known risk factors, like smoking, Diethylstilbestrol (DES) Exposure, the ages at which the women started menstruation and menopause, previous chest radiation, alcohol use, obesity and physical activity as these are all well known and documented risk factors. How do the statistics of those risk factors in countries with higher abortion rates compare with countries with lower abortion rates?

It is also important to note that heredity, genetics and race also play a factor as women with an inherited BRCA1 or BRCA2 mutation have up to an 80% chance of developing breast cancer during their lifetime and BRCA mutations are found most often in Jewish women of Ashkenazi (Eastern Europe) origin, although they can occur in any racial or ethnic group but White women are slightly more likely to develop breast cancer than are African-American women.

Carroll suggests that the known preference for abortion in this class might explain the phenomenon. Women pursuing higher educations and professional careers often delay marriage and childbearing. Abortions before the birth of a first child are highly carcinogenic.

The words “suggests” and “might” shows he is making a hypothesis here. Did he really look at the rates of abortion among the social classes?

I think there are a lot of good reasons to oppose abortion as I do, but junk science and faulty studies are not at the top of my list of reasons. I don’t like junk science and faulty studies and skewed statistics to support global warm claims either.

I also have a family member and two close friends who have been diagnosed with breast cancer who, I am very confident, never had any abortions. My sister-in-law is a devout Catholic and never took birth control and after marrying my brother, had her first child in her early twenties and then two more children in five years. She is a smoker however with a family history of cancer including breast cancer so abortion did cause her cancer. Gratefully she is also a 15 year survivor after a double mastectomy and two rounds of chemo and several reconstructive surgeries. While both of her two daughters had their first children at a young age, late teens and early twenties and have both had other children since, their family history of breast cancer dicated that they get mammograms every two years.

Unless the breast cancer in these countries afflicts women who’ve had abortions disproportionately - a point which the report seems to evade making - the most we have here is evidence of some cultural factor leading to both abortions and breast cancer.

It's not cultural .... it's hormonal.... and hormones are powerful, especially the estrogens and progesterone.

Our bodies were knit together in a glorious order. When that order is disrupted, there are sometimes unintended and unexpected consequences.

~~~~~~~~

The Biological Explanation For The Link

"The explanation for the independent link makes good biological sense. It remains unrefuted and unchallenged by scientists because it is physiologically correct.

A never-pregnant woman has a network of primitive, immature and cancer-vulnerable breast cells which make up her milk glands. It is only in the third trimester of pregnancy - after 32 weeks gestation - that her cells start to mature and are fashioned into milk producing tissue whose cells are cancer resistant.

When a woman becomes pregnant, her breasts enlarge. This occurs because a hormone called estradiol, a type of estrogen, causes both the normal and pre-cancerous cells in the breast to multiply terrifically. This process is called “proliferation.” By 7 to 8 weeks gestation, the estradiol level has increased by 500% over what it was at the time of conception.

If the pregnancy is carried to term, a second process called “differentiation” takes place. Differentiation is the shaping of cells into milk producing tissue. It shuts off the cell multiplication process. This takes place at approximately 32 weeks gestation.

If the pregnancy is aborted, the woman is left with more undifferentiated -- and therefore cancer-vulnerable cells -- than she had before she was pregnant. On the other hand, a full term pregnancy leaves a woman with more milk producing differentiated cells, which means that she has fewer cancer-vulnerable cells in her breasts than she did before the pregnancy.

In contrast, research has shown that most miscarriages do not raise breast cancer risk. This is due to a lack of estrogen overexposure. Miscarriages are frequently precipitated by a decline in the production of progesterone which is needed to maintain a pregnancy. Estrogen is made from progesterone, so the levels of each hormone rise and fall together during pregnancy.

For a thorough biological explanation of the abortion-breast cancer link, see this second website for the Breast Cancer Prevention Institute, www.BCPInstitute.org and click on its online booklet, “Breast Cancer Risks and Prevention.”