"In 1986, government scientists wrote a letter to the British journal Cancet and acknowledged that abortion is a cause of breast cancer. They wrote, “Induced abortion before first term pregnancy increases the risk of breast cancer.” (Lancet,2/22/86, p.436.)
As of 2005, seven medical organizations recognize that abortion raises a womamn’s risk for breast cancer, independently of the risk of delaying the birth of a first child (a secondary effect that all experts already acknowledge). An additional medical organization, the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons, issued a statement in 2003 calling on doctors to inform patients about a “highly plausible” relationship between abortion and breast caner…
It’s probably a case of a fundamental attributional error. Women who have abortions might disproportionately have other risk factors such as smoking or poor diet.
It is, in a way, true:
“Even as politically correct studies have been promulgated to neutralize the data proving the abortion breast cancer link, even stronger data have emerged in recent years that firmly link abortion to premature births in subsequent pregnancies, which in turn raise the risk of breast cancer in mothers and cerebral palsy in prematurely born children.”
Do a search on abortion breast cancer at pubmed. They only provide you with abstracts, but in most cases this includes a bit of a conclusion.
Another one from there:
“Abortion increases breast cancer risk through multiple mechanisms. Pregnancy exposes women to high levels of estrogen acting as a mitogen and genotoxin, and induced abortion then leaves their breasts with more places for cancers to start. They have a higher risk of subsequent premature deliveries that further increase their risks of breast cancer.”
But lots of stuff gives you an increased risk of cancer. And to give a liittle perspective:
“In 2000, 12,469 Australian women died from CHD*. A little known fact is that this is 5 times as many deaths from breast cancer.*”
*CHD = Coronary Heart Disease
*1. Australian Institute of Health and Welfare 2002. Australia’s health 2002. Canberra: AIHW.
And don’t assume that because a belief is held by someone you are politically opposed to it must be wrong.
Did you think abortion had no side affects at all? It is not an entirely safe procedure. Of course anti-abortionists are going to use that fact to their advantage. And again, it is all about perspective.
What are the chances of dying in pregnancy? 12 in 100,000.
What are the chances of getting breast cancer and dying of it? 26 per 100,000
What are the chances of getting breast cancer from having an abortion and dying of it? Who knows, but I hazard to guess it would be significantly less than either of those figures.
What are you getting at? Isn’t the number of abortions-to-save-the-life-of-the-mother relatively tiny (leaving out the idea that most proposals to “outlaw” abortion have an exception for this)? Wouldn’t the proportion be the same among those who planned to carry the pregnancy to term?
Death due to botched abortion seems like a different question.
Go You Big Red Fire Engine- Did you note that the Brind paper you linked to was published in the National Catholic Bioethics Quarterly?
The Lanfranchi article you also linked to was published in *Issues of Law and Medicine * which is published by the Horatio R. Storer Foundation, which has links to the Right to Life movement.
From http://www.nrlc.org/news/1999/NRL399/bos.htm
"Issues in Law & Medicine is a quarterly peer-reviewed professional journal published by the National Legal Center for the Medically Dependent & Disabled, Inc.; the Horatio R. Storer Foundation, Inc.; and the American Academy of Medical Ethics, Inc. The Horatio R. Storer Foundation is funded by grants from the National Right to Life Educational Trust Fund."
Personally, I’m used to reading medical articles, and the Lanfranchi abstract jumped right out at me because of the vague, unscientific and inflammatory language.
I’m not saying their research isn’t valid…I’m just pointing out that you’re not talking about unbiased sources. Just because the abstract is on Pub Med, doesn’t mean it’s true, nor that the full paper has valid statistical evidence to back it up.
I just picked a couple off the first page. There were a LOT. I was dubious if any would come up in support upon searching, but some did. I coudln’t really be bothered actually reading the articles (I have some subscriptions) to see whether they are all Catholic propaganda (which I doubt they are).
Of course, the place the article is published does not often have consequences on the results of the experiment. A Catholic foundation would readily seek out/accept this kind of article for their own means. I don’t think, that in this case, it is relevant where it is published (Unless there is a direct link between the researcher being somehow funded or affiliated with the right-to-life movement).
Ah of course, it CAN’T be true, because then the “evil right” would have some sort of argument against abortion. Because we all know that abortion is 100% safe! She hasn’t debunked it yet, and it seems you haven’t made any effort to do a search for yourself to debunk it either. So it seems that you won’t listen to anything to the contrary of your belief, and you expect to be force fed the answers that YOU want. Why don’t you just believe what you already believe and not btoher us with it?
Journals can’t edit the material recieved before they put it in their journal. They can request the author make certain changes before accepting it, but they cannot edit it. They also, in general, don’t pay the author. So, the only reason a researcher would want to get published is for recognition and grants. Biasing your own results doesn’t lead to many research grants, since I can’t imagine there is a large budget for Catholic science.
Saying the research is wrong because of where it was published is like saying that any statistics used to support a cause are wrong.
Go You Big Red Fire Engine- I actually went on pub med and looked up the papers you linked to, because something didn’t seem right with the language.
IMO neutral papers use neutral language.
Neutral papers don’t use “politically correct” as an insult, Brind quite obviously has an agenda, and apologies, but the article was also published in Issues in Law and Medicine.
Like I said, I’m not totally discounting their research completely, merely pointing out that they did not go into this with open minds, nor are they agenda-less. This isn’t about anti-religious bias, it’s about exposing the bias in others.
Fair enough. I don’t follow politics at all (even medical politics), and I have trouble reading tone from written words. Those two do seem rather suspect, and I also suspect if you dig around a bit further back than last year (which it seems is when this controversy started off) you may find some unbiased sources.
Of course, we still haven’t disproved the OP, but they don’t seem to me to be interested in getting the truth.
I usually go to eMedicine for health information. They say:
IANA biologist or a doctor, but I don’t get Lanfranchi’s reasoning. Pregnancy makes for lots of estrogen, estrogen makes breast cells divide and trashes their DNA, which leads to cancer, therefore abortion causes cancer? Sounds more like pregnancy causes cancer.
“No study can change our biology or what we have witnessed in our own communities. Over the past 30 years, cumulative lifetime risk of breast cancer has gone from 1 in 12 to 1 in 7 women. The women with breast cancer in our neighborhoods are getting younger and younger. Every woman who understands her own biology knows why.”
Now, that implies that abortion (30 years being the big figure, because it roughly correlates with Roe vs Wade) is the major reason for younger women getting breast cancer.
She doesn’t take into account that breast cancer risk rises with age, and that most of the rise in risk (from 1 in 12 to 1 in7) can be accounted for simply by people living longer.
She doesn’t take into account increased use of oral contraceptives and HRT, long-term use is linked to a minor increase in breast cancer.
She doesn’t take into account that women are delaying childbearing and pregnancy into their thirties, and that fewer women are breast feeding…both late pregnancy and bottle feeding increase risk.
She doesn’t take into account that a significant proportion of young women with breast cancer have the BRCA1 or BRCA2 gene.
I should probably say, my medical school requires everyone to take a course on medical statistics and critical analysis of medical research…the most horribly boring course of my life, but I can now spot bias, dodgy statistics and weirdly designed studies (not well, but enough to allow me to analyse data). It’s why Brind and Lanfranchi twigged my radar, the language just seemed off.
Part of the course involved people reading an issue of a well-known journal (e.g. JAMA, NEJM, the Lancet) and finding how many times studies didn’t prove exactly what the authors claimed that they did. Honestly, you’d be surprised- either the cohorts are too small, the selection criteria is dodgy or the confidence intervals and P values show that the data is statistically insignificant.
The most important thing to remember is that all studies should be designed to disprove your theory, not to prove it.
Mr. Engine: I welcome your participation in my thread and want you to know that your input is helpful in exposing the truth, whatever it may be. I don’t think that my opinion on the subject is so slanted that it has impacted the dialogue in this thread, I mean, I premised the thread on my understanding of the subject but if solid data (say research done at a major western uni? or by eminent established researchers?) came to light I would accept it. FWI, my bias was formed partially by my initial reaction to the meme but largely reinforced by a conversation with a physician who I bounced the idea off (she compared a link between breast cancer & abortion to a link between another q someone recently asked her about cutting a babies hair effecting its speech development).
Irishgirl may not have definitively disproven the theory but I find what she’s espoused thus far to be logical and easy to follow and generally great, and not because she supports my initial beliefs, but rather because she’s done so in such a transparent honest manner.
"Why don’t you just believe what you already believe and not btoher (sic) us with it?"
Because I find it stimulating to solidify my beliefs by critically examing them. He who sits back and refuses to entertain the possibility that one’s epistemological paradigm is without flaws cannot learn or grow. This is an idea that perhaps you might consider.
Let’s look closer at the CDC page you linked to:
"A pregnancy-related death is one that occurs during pregnancy or within a year after the end of pregnancy and is caused by pregnancy complications. Most (60 percent) of pregnancy-related deaths occurred after a live birth.
A total of 525 pregnancy-related deaths occurred in 1999 (the latest year for which data were available).
During 1991 to 1999, 4,200 deaths were found to be pregnancy-related
During the study period, about 12 pregnancy-related deaths occurred for every 100,000 live births."
Those numbers include pregnancies that end in abortion, but the quote does not explicitly sort them out. They do separate “stillbirths,” which would include abortions. However, 60% of the deaths occured after a live birth. Carrying a pregnancy to full term is not a safe procedure, either. Women who abort a pregnancy obviously don’t have the riskiest part of a pregnancy, that is, birth. Giving birth is more dangerous than abortion.
There have been some studies that suggested a link between abortion and higher breast cancer risk, but even more studies (especially the most recent ones) that have found no increased risk or even a slight protective effect of induced abortion.
One of the first large-scale studies that pops up on a PubMed search is a March 2004 review in the respected British journal Lancet by Beral et al, which looked at a total of 53 separate epidemiologic studies and concluded the following:
Pregnancies that end as a spontaneous or induced abortion do not increase a woman’s risk of developing breast cancer. Collectively, the studies of breast cancer with retrospective recording of induced abortion yielded misleading results, possibly because women who had developed breast cancer were, on average, more likely than other women to disclose previous induced abortions.