Another ABC controversy

Instead they are women who have had no or fewer children and/or started having children at a later age, all of which put them at higher breast cancer risk.

Hence, comparing women who've had an abortion to women who are at elevated risk for other reasons makes the risk due to abortion tend to disappear. Huang et al.'s meta-regression analysis showed a clear tendency for the risk due to abortion to seem to decline as the prevalence of abortion among the healthy population increases, among all the studies in China.

Dr. Brind comments: "As I have shown in previous stories for (US) National Right to Life News and and National Right to Life News Today, objective research like this has been relentlessly targeted by abortion advocates entrenched in universities, medical societies, medical journals, breast cancer charities, and especially, government agencies such as the (US) National Cancer Institute.

"This assault culminated in a 2003 international phony 'workshop' by the NCI, which officially declared the ABC link non-existent. Since 2003, armed with this new official 'truth,' the National Abortion & Reproductive Rights Action League (NARAL) and their ilk have unapologetically and publicly attacked pro-life pregnancy resource centers for 'lying' to women by telling them about the ABC link. In places like Maryland, San Francisco, Austin and New York City, they even went so far as to enact laws to muzzle these women-helping- centers. Thankfully, most courts have struck down such laws as violations of free speech rights–so far.

"It is really frightening when you start doing the math on the impact of abortion on a population of over a billion women-in India and China alone: Just a 2% lifetime risk of breast cancer due to abortion-a very conservative estimate-means upwards of 10 million women getting breast cancer, and millions dying from it. Hopefully, the day is near when the official purveyors of public health information-like the NCI-will no longer be able to deny the ABC link. The new Chinese meta-analysis should hasten that day considerably."

Reggie Littlejohn, President of "Women's Rights Without Frontiers", said the research reveals "yet another human rights violation in connection with China's One Child Policy. So, the women of China have to endure the tremendous trauma of late term forced abortion, taking their babies from them, and then years later, breast cancer, taking their health and even their lives from them."

Mary L Davenport, MD, FACOG, Medical Director, Magnificat Maternal Health Program and immediate past president of the American Association of Pro-Life Obstetricians and Gynecologists wrote in The American Thinker that the Huang meta-analysis is another example of the recent excellent scholarship on abortion in peer-reviewed journals coming out of the People's Republic. There is no bigger data base than China, where there are an average of 8.2 million pregnancy terminations every year, and 40 abortions for every 100 live births. Chinese researchers and physicians are unencumbered by abortion politics, and do not cover up data showing long term effects of induced abortion, as do their US counterparts in governmental, professional and consumer organizations......

" Professor Brind, is not unique in having experienced censorship of his findings for the past two decades, including at the notorious National Cancer Institute (NCI) workshop on 'Early reproductive events and breast cancer' in 2003. This important workshop was manipulated by its chairperson NCI epidemiologist Louise Brinton to suppress critical information on the abortion-breast cancer link. The main speaker on abortion and breast cancer, Leslie Bernstein, who had never published on this topic, openly said 'I would never be a proponent of going around and telling women that having babies is the way to reduce your risk,' even though it has been an established fact, conceded by abortion proponents, that this is true.

"The NCI workshop was designed to influence subsequent governmental policy, academic scholarship, physicians, and popular perception of the topic, and succeeded in doing so. It also influenced the individual life trajectories of many women who were led to believe, falsely, that an abortion decision would not have an impact on their future breast cancer risk. Because there is a lag time between abortion and the appearance of breast cancer, the effect of an abortion is not immediate for an individual. And abortion is only one of a number of factors influencing breast cancer risk, such as family history, use of hormones, and age at first childbirth.

"The majority of women who have breast cancer have never had an abortion. Nonetheless, there will be some women who develop breast cancer and die from it, impacted by the failure to inform them of the ABC link, and its dismissal by establishment medical and consumer groups such as the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists and the Susan Komen Foundation. This is an ethical breach of huge proportions.

"The new Chinese meta-analysis not only concerns the ABC link on an individual level, but also confirms the observation of statistician Patrick Carroll, who predicted the rise in breast cancer in several European countries following legalization of abortion. Again, because of the lag time between abortion and the appearance of breast cancer, the link is not immediately apparent. Carroll's work is important because he finds that not only is induced abortion an independent risk factor for breast cancer (separate from such factors as late child-bearing) but that it is the best predictive factor for forecasting a nation's future breast cancer rates. Nations such as China, with traditionally low breast cancer rates, are now seeing an increase, many years following their legalization of abortion."

Interesting, Dr. Louise Brinton, chairperson of the NCI workshop which concluded there was no ABC link, has been caught out because in 2010 she co-signed a study by Jessica Dolle et al. of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center which found that "a statistically significant 40% increased risk of breast cancer exists for women who have abortions." Dr. Brinton has since refused media requests for interviews or comments.

The Cancer Council of Victoria has also refused to meet with me and a doctor who has written on the ABC link. Cancer Councils in Australia encourage women to dress in pink outfits and jump and run to raise money for research, but do not tell women of research already available. It would be interesting to have their staff salaries and "administrative" costs published as has happened with the salaries of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.