News/Publications

Abortion/Breast Cancer

Abortion and Breast Cancer

The Coalitiion on Abortion/Breast Cancer is preparing a press release for Thursday announcing that Dr. Joel Brind, president of the Breast Cancer Prevention Institute, has authored an update to his scientific team's 1996 review and meta-analysis of the worldwide literature that implicates abortion as an independent risk factor for breast cancer. As you might already know, his scientific team's 1996 paper reported a risk increase of 30% for women who have abortions after first full term pregnancy and 50% for women who have abortions before first full term pregnancy.

Dr. Brind analyzed 10 prospective studies that are being widely used by the U.S. National Cancer Institute, the abortion industry, and others to mislead women about the "safety" of abortion. It's all fraudulent research.

Within the last year, Brind and three other experts (independently of one another) published criticisms of yet another paper widely used to discredit the independent link between abortion and breast cancer. It's also fraudulent. It's a paper by Valerie Beral et al. published in the British journal Lancet in 2004.

This means that the research that is being used to discredit the abortion-breast cancer link is not credible and the 1996 review by Joel Brind and his Penn State colleagues is credible. Overwhelming, diverse evidence published since 1957 supports an independent link.

The U.S. National Cancer Institute was wrong a half-century ago when it denied a tobacco-cancer link. It's wrong again about the abortion-cancer link. On April 14, 1954 when the New York Times quoted its expert as having said that: ""It may be concluded that the existing evidence neither proves nor strongly indicates that tobacco smoking and especially cigarette smoking represent a major or even predominating causal factor in the production of cancers of the respiratory tract and are the main reason for the phenomenal increase of pulmonary tumors during recent decades. If excessive smoking actually plays a role in the production of lung cancer, it seems to be a minor one, if judged from the evidence on hand."

In addition, there is a second breast cancer risk of abortion that is recognized by scientists, but few people (including doctors) connect the dots to abortion. Scientists agree that the later a woman has her first full term pregnancy, the greater her breast cancer risk is. This effect has been known since the publication of a study by Trichopolous et al. in 1983. It means that the woman who has an abortion before the birth of a first child delays her first full term pregnancy, perhaps forever. It also means that the woman who has an abortion has a greater breast cancer risk than she would have if she carried the pregnancy to term.

Common law imposes a legal obligation on doctors to reveal this information to women. (Two women have already successfully sued their abortion providers for neglecting to disclose the breast cancer risk, as well as the emotional risk of abortion.)