This is in reply to a poster who pointed to the article on Leadership U website (which you should know is run by Campus Crusade for Christ: and which also specializes in providing information on creationism and 'curing' homosexuality.)

The article you pointed us to was by Joel Brind, who is not an 'M.D. ' doctor , but a 'Ph.D.' doctor. His field of expertise is diabetes, not epidemiology but his "bio" page conveniently omits this information. Also absent is the information that Joel Brind is president of a right-to-life organization. He is hardly an unbiased source.

Had he been seriously seeking peer review on this important medical subject he would have tried having his work printed in the New England Journal of Medicine, The Lancet (British) or the Journal of the American Medical Association. {Who knows - he may have and been rejected.}

Ohio 'Right To Life', one of the main 'RTlife' sources in the US, includes the following from Brind's study and other sources:

Breast cancer....1.)breast cancer in America has risen by 50% since abortion was legalized in 1973, and is on the rise around the world. 

Statistically this is known as a false co-relation. We need something to tie the two together to start proving cause and effect. We could, for example, be using Video Terminals more also, and this might be the cause. We might be eating more chocolate truffles. You see the problem I'm sure.

One of the problems I personally have with Brind is that according to his simple calculation (25 Dec 1995, National Review, pp. 38-41) a woman has 300 times the risk of death via an induced abortion compared to childbirth. When he can stroke statistics to produce those results I really have trouble believing anything he says.

I had thought to go through the Ohiolife site study by study to show the flaw in their interpretation but that would be only - as some might say - a battle of statistics and spin and would not be very helpful. So I'm going to try a different approach.

Instead of that let's start by looking at the meaning of studies.

One piece of research studied women who wore a bra all day and found a 12,000% increased risk of breast cancer in these women. One biological hypothesis here was that bras contain manmade fibers that collect radon during the manufacturing process, after which the radon decays and emits gamma radiation all day into a woman's breast. The two Harvard researchers who proposed this theory used exactly the same language as abortion opponents do in their letter to the journal Risk Analysis: 

"Breast cancer has reached epidemic proportions in the United States...One has to wonder why this alarming increase in breast cancer in the past few decades and question whether unrecognized environmental agents may be at work." ("Radon plateout on synthetic fibers as a possible risk factor in breast cancer." Risk Anal 1996 Feb;16(1):1-2.)

The main argument and the 'best' and most recent study of the abortion opponents is the Brind meta study. Let us for a minute pretend that the studies the Brind study based its conclusion on are not actually flawed and Brind actually discovered an accepted mechanism to correct for recall bias. Let us further pretend that the speculative connection between hormones and breast cancer, that he postulated and reputable scientists laugh at, is real. If these assumptions are accepted we then accept his findings that abortion increases a possibility of breast cancer by 30%. Now let's look at what that would actually mean in the real world.

Lung cancer is a relatively rare disease. If smoking increased the lifetime risk of lung cancer by 30% it would mean that instead of 100 people out of a million eventually getting lung cancer 130 would. If you smoke you will actually increase your lifetime risk of getting lung cancer by 2,000% according to the National Cancer Institute. This helps put the lifetime 30% risk back in context. As a matter of fact you have a much higher lifetime risk of becoming a patient with some other illness (heart disease or some other disease) than breast cancer so we should be concentrating more energy on those than we currently do. {See Table 1 from the article on Risk } Furthermore as table 1 clearly shows, most women who develop breast cancer do not die from it. Even if we were to grant Brind the point his numbers are correct a 30% risk would not be significant. Brind's risk is similar to studies that claim an association between breast cancer and the consumption of olive oil (twenty-five percent), a birth weight of more than eight pounds in women (thirty percent), or a weight gain of more than forty pounds after age eighteen (forty percent).

Here's something else to think about: In Japan today 3/4 of all 50 year old women have had an abortion since legal abortion has been the main method of birth control for 50 years. Yet Japanese women have a much lower incidence of breast cancer than their North American sisters. If there were actually a significant breast cancer risk associated with abortion they should be dying from breast cancer at three times the rate of American women yet the incidence is approximately 1/3 the NA rate. see Cancer Statistics in Japan).

In order to buy the link between abortion and breast cancer as described by abortion opponents you must also believe that the major Cancer Societies of countries where abortion is not as political an issue as it is in the USA (Britain, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, major European countries) are conspiring with the National Cancer Institute (NCI) to suppress the information. What would be the reason for such a huge international conspiracy and what would they have to gain by such a conspiracy?

Check the information for yourself and see which major oncology or specifically breast cancer society warns of abortion as a significant risk factor and when you don't find it ask yourself why!! Go to The Phenomenal Women site, an excellent resource. Look at the ORGANIZATIONS & INSTITUTIONS list, and check each one that tells of the risks. Abortion is not listed as a risk on these sites, for good reason.

If you don't die from old age the probability that you will die from some other disease than breast cancer is 400 times greater. (table 1 Risks op cit)

To repeat stating that abortion poses a significant risk of breast cancer is nothing less than a dishonest manipulation of statistics and is being used as a terror weapon by those who know better but will use any underhanded tactic to prevent women from acting in their own best interest. It plays on women's unrealistic fears concerning the disease. It is terrorism.

Some More to think about If You Aren't Already Convinced!!

ABC is Brind speak for Abortion Breast Cancer and you can usually tell if a Brind devotee is posting by the use of that acronym - but of course many posters on this subject are not indoctrinated by Brind (though many are. If you put 'abortion "breast cancer" link' in a search engine the majority of the links will point to Brind - it is almost exclusively his construct.)

What Brindites consistently do is pretend there is no contrary evidence to their beliefs. I know these have been pointed out to many of you before, including the one currently waging this campaign of misinformation and insisting that it be legally mandated that women be presented with this faulty information, so they are ignoring contrary evidence to retain some semblance of personal truth. However by doing so and pretending these studies don't exist they are guilty of presenting false information through their own actions. That, folks, is lying according to dictionaries I've consulted. Daling is constantly professed to be a "pro choice" researcher who found a breast cancer link 'and wished she didn't'. Her study was as flawed as Brind's study and she admitted as much later.

See: Discussing report bias which Brind and Daling are guilty of. Here's are some Comments on the Daling study by the National Cancer Institute - pay particular attention to the Rosenberg comments in the second last paragraph.

Then we come to Mads Melbye et al 1996 The definitive study which would END the speculation if this were not simply a political game for some abortion opponents. This was a cohort study of 1.5 million women (28.5 million person-years) and the study concluded Induced abortions have no overall effect on the risk of breast cancer. If you check the letters on that study in the later JAMA editions you will note Brind makes a complete fool of himself by his criticism of Melbye - by demonstrating he really does not understand the meaning of this cohort study as Meds Melbye's later answering letter clearly shows. Brind pretends this never happened on his website by clever linguistics and never answers the Melbye criticisms. Brind acknowledges the study - but dismisses it as flawed without referring to Melby's response to him.

Now concerning pregnancy and cancer - also be warned - that these are little facts that the Abortion Opponents will never tell you as a part of their so called 'informed consent', and they are not meant to turn anybody against childbirth. They are simply some balancing information concerning pregnancy risks.

The more children carried to birth by a woman, the more probability she has of developing liver or cervical cancer. A women who bears children is also less likely to develop breast cancer, but there is a higher probability that if she does develop it,she will die from it. See Intl. Jour. Cancer 1992 Sep 30;52(3):pp351-354, and Lancet 1994 Jun 25;343(8913):1587-1589.)

Also if you decide to give birth you might want to check this study - Long-term impact of reproductive factors on cancer risk. La Vecchia C, Negri E, Franceschi S, Parazzini F Int J Cancer 1993 Jan 21;53(2):215-9 Reproductive factors and the risk of invasive and intraepithelial cervical neoplasia.
Parazzini F, La Vecchia C, Negri E, Cecchetti G, Fedele L Br J Cancer 1989 May;59(5):805-9

Once More referring to the 'Risk' article above from NEJM which shows the risk of breast cancer as one in 33,000 over your full lifetime of 85 years and 1/1000000 at some stages, *with or without* an abortion. 

When asked directly "does abortion cause breast cancer" I usually answer the question by saying you are just as likely to get liver or cervical cancer by carrying to term as you are to get breast cancer by aborting or miscarrying - and remember even abstinent nuns get breast cancer, at the same rate as the rest of the population, because it can take many forms and have many causes. Furthermore there are currently six forms of breast cancer and the 'link' never tells you which form they are talking about because that would reduce the possible number of women 'at risk' and dilute the results of bad research even further.

I could list more studies - Medline has about 250 in total, but that's enough. If we're going to inform let's inform fully of both the risks of abortion as well as the risks of carrying to term.

Eileen 

DISCLAIMER:
Just in case anybody did not understand it - 'the bra study' was a phony. It was statistically correct, like a homework exercise, but the reasons they gave for getting breast cancer were simply made up.

FURTHER DISCLAIMER?

IF ANYBODY is still unsure about this supposed link or if they are unsure about any of the information I've presented here and need it explained in clearer terms, DON'T SIT AND WORRY!! POST your question to me!!

Eileen