Abortion and breast cancer, Abortion proponents protest too much, methinks
Joel Brind
When the US state of Texas published an informational booklet for women considering abortion, in accordance with its informed consent statute, it was apparently far beyond the pale for its "The Woman's Right to Know" booklet to even suggest that "If you give birth to your baby, you are less likely to develop breast cancer in the future. Research indicates that having an abortion will not provide you this increased protection against breast cancer". To the Washington Post "Factchecker" Michelle Ye Hee Lee, (14 Dec. 2016) anything short of robust denial of the reality of the abortionbreast cancer link (ABC-link) is deserving of at least 3 Pinocchios out of 4.
But apparently, that wasn't enough to wipe out any credibility
for the ABC link, so Snopes.com - the self-appointed
arbiter of what is real and what is fake in the news, put out a
very lengthy treatise on 3 Feb this year, calling the ABC link
decidedly "false", although it weasel-worded the headline by
overstating the link it labeled "false". It called "false" the
statement: "Studies have proved that having an abortion increases
a woman's risk of developing breast cancer." So since
when does the burden of proof fall upon those calling out the
hazard? The precautionary principle never seems to apply
when it comes to abortion.
But I digress. The real question here is why there is so much effort directed to squash any credence given the dangers of abortion. Actually, this likely sounds rather familiar to Australian audiences, given the convulsive denials emanating from the Australian body politic and body medic, if you will, following on the heels of Dr. Angela Lanfranchi's visit to Australia back in 2014. Most prominent at the time was a socalled "study" on Australian women which appeared hastily in the prestigious Medical Journal of Australia (MJA). It was actually published in the MJA merely as a letter, revealing no data on induced abortion at all! Never mind the 1988 Adelaide study which showed a 160% increased risk of breast cancer among South Australian women. And in fact, the Adelaide data was buried for 7 years before it was published, even though induced abortion was the strongest risk factor observed!
But back to the central question, and its obvious answer: The ABC link is real. Prominent medical journals, medical societies, popular journals, cancer charities, politicians and health ministries around the world have been trying to squash the knowledge of it for at least 35 years, that I can document. All the while, even as breast cancer continues as a great scourge in the West, it has become a burgeoning epidemic in Asia, with evidence of the ABC link exploding just within the past decade.
A 2013 meta-analysis of 36 studies from mainland China
reported a 44% overall increased risk, similar to what we
had reported in our 1996 meta-analysis of worldwide studies.
But an even more compelling picture is emerging from
South Asia. That's because, unlike in the West, where there
are many risk factors for breast cancer present, in South
Asia, there are few. On the Indian subcontinent, the traditional woman is married as a teenager and starts having children
right away, has several of them and breastfeeds all of
them. Moreover, she doesn't smoke or drink alcohol. In short,
there are very few risk factors for breast cancer, save for
abortion and contraceptive steroids ("the pill"). Consequently,
breast cancer has been relatively rare until very recently (closer
to 1% lifetime risk v. over 10% lifetime risk in the West). So
when epidemiological studies are performed in South Asia,
the risk increases seen for women with any abortion average
not 30-50%, but more like 150%! Two studies in Bengali
women even reported risk increases exceeding 1,000%! And
the number of South Asian studies reporting risk increases
with abortion is prodigious: Our count stands at 17 in the
peer-reviewed literature, just within the past 10 years! My
colleagues at the Breast Cancer Prevention Institute and I
are in the process of compiling a systematic review and metaanalysis
of the South Asian ABC literature, and expect to
publish it later this year.
And when we consider the fact that there are so many women
in Asia, the effects of the ABC link begin to resemble a real
holocaust. Consider that there are over a billion women in
India and China alone. If half of them end up having one or
more abortions (a statistic fast approaching), and their lifetime
risk is raised merely from 2% to 4% thereby, we have
2% of 50% of a billion, i.e., 10 million women likely to get
breast cancer because they had an abortion! Moreover, the
mortality rate is not a mere 20% as in the West, but more
like 50%. So it's quite conservative to estimate that over the
next several decades, 5 million Asian women will die of breast
cancer because they had an abortion. The politically correct
purveyors of public health information can't cover this up
much longer, can they? 