Abortion Law Reform Association's new "Fact Sheet" on Abortion and breast Cancer: New Ways to Tell Old Lies
By Joel Brind, PhD
The breast cancer epidemic has been going global in recent years - with some of the blame falling squarely on abortion. This is now obvious with literally dozens of studies coming out of south and central Asia and the Mideast, just within the past decade.
And this follows on the now raging breast cancer epidemic
in China, following on the infamous "one child policy" instituted
in 1980. The role of abortion there became clear in
2013 with Hubei Huang et al. publishing a systematic review
and meta-analysis of no less than 3 dozen studies from
mainland China alone.
So what I and my colleagues documented with our own review and meta-analysis back in 1996, among worldwide studies at that time-a 30% increase in breast cancer risk among women with a history of any induced abortions-is now starring on the world stage for all to see (and literally millions of women to suffer from).
This time, however, it's more of an increase (44% in China, and well over 100% in South Asia, where breast cancer is less common to begin with).
So if you are the trade association of the people that do the abortions (the obstetrician/gynaecologists associations like the American College of ObGyns [ACOG], and the Royal College of ObGyns [RCOG]), you've got a major PR problem on your hands. Sure, you can recycle the old lies promulgated by the US National Cancer Institute (NCI) back in 2003, but 14-year-old conclusions about allegedly "safe abortion" are a bit old.
Along comes the abortion advocacy group "Abortion Law Reform Association New Zealand" (ALRANZ) with a refurbished pack of lies they call a "fact sheet". Sure, the new "fact sheet" trots out the the NCI's 2003 "workshop" findings that "Neither induced nor spontaneous abortions are linked to an rise (sic) in breast cancer risk." I was one of the experts at the "workshop", and we were not even permitted to examine the data, during this charade of one-sided presentations.
However, the NCI disburses the grant money for most of the breast cancer research, and, as one other breast cancer researcher told me, in declining to collaborate on a minority report: "I have to live with these people every day; they have to sign off on my grants."
So I wrote a minority report anyway, which the NCI acknowledges on their website as a "minority dissenting comment", but with no link to the text nor even a mention of the author's name. (But you can find it here: http:// bcpinstitute.org/papers/NCI_minority%20report-3_2003- brind.pdf)
So the new angle from ALRANZ goes like this (as the very first "fact" on their "fact sheet", no less):"Many studies with strong research designs conducted throughout the world with hundreds of thousands of women, unanimously conclude that women who have had either spontaneous or induced abortions do not have a subsequent elevated risk for developing breast cancer."
Just in case you missed it, let's follow the logic here: We start with "Many studies". How many they don't say, nor- most importantly-do they say what proportion of extant studies they are talking about. Next, we hear that they are "studies with strong research designs", which sounds meaningful, but has no meaning whatsoever, because they don't say whether they are good studies or bad (Most of these "many" are actually provably fraudulent, and I have published deconstructions of them.)
But the real twist is when they tell you that these studies "unanimously conclude" something. So for example, say you have 100 studies, and 20 of them come to one conclusion (say, that there's no link between abortion and breast cancer), and 80 of them come to the opposite conclusion (that there is a link between abortion and breast cancer). Well, the 20 studies can truthfully be called "many", right? So taking the "many" (20) studies comprising a small minority of the total, we can say truthfully that these "many" studies "unanimously conclude" that there is no link.
See? It's unanimous!
This should set a new world's Olympic record in gymnastics- verbal gymnastics, that is!
But facts, like the fact that abortion does indeed raise a
woman's risk of breast cancer, are not subject to majority
rule. Yes, they can be denied by a majority of health ministries,
abortionist associations, even voluntary anti-cancer charities
(in reality, all the same cadre of politically correct population
controllers), and you may arrive at any "consensus"
you like, but consensus and majority rule are purely political
constructs. But facts are indeed stubborn things. The earth is
round, its climate naturally varies over time, and abortion
increases a woman's risk of breast cancer.
