Cool heads needed on the abortion-breast cancer link

As with all rigorous medical research this paper looked for a biological explanation for their positive findings. They note that completing a pregnancy prior to any subsequent abortion was strongly protective against breast cancer – which is a widely accepted finding – and postulated, “This effect may be because the differentiation of mammary cells which occurs during a full –term pregnancy prevents the carcinogenic effect of subsequent interrupted pregnancies.”That hypothesis – of interrupted pregnancies being carcinogenic because they arrest breast cell development in an immature and vulnerable state, and the related finding that the cancer risk is strongly mitigated by an initial full-term pregnancy - is exactly the hypothesis Dr Lanfranchi will be discussing on her speaking tour, yet for some reason she is not accorded the same respect as the Lecarpentier team.

Finally, the French study proposes a scoring system “useful for the individual estimation of breast cancer risk” based on a number of variables such as the stage of abortion, the number of abortions, and whether there was a protective full–term pregnancy at the start. Such a scoring system would allow closer screening of higher-risk individuals, and that is a valuable tool in any cancer screening programme.

So why would the AMA President treat with such contempt research which might help women know they are higher-risk and therefore needing closer screening? 

Instead he issued a ruling: “There is no link between abortion and breast cancer. We need to make that very clear to the public, and certainly we should not be promoting any papers from the 1950s.”

This reference to the 1950s was in response to comments made by Senator Eric Abetz on the Ten Network’s The Project. Watch his lips as he speaks the words that lit the fuse of this month’s media frenzy: “I think the studies, and I think they date back from the 1950s, assert that there is a link between abortion and breast cancer”.  

Abetz was correct, and if Dr Owler was so inclined he could read back through more than seventy published studies between 1957 and 2014 and find that more than three quarters of them (of widely varying quality) assert a correlation between abortion and breast cancer. So where is the cause for offense in the Senator’s statement?

Abetz made clear that he was not going to make a judgement on the “factual correctness” of the hypothesis saying, “I don’t have that scientific expertise” but he simply reported the fact that many studies do “assert that there is a link”.

No problem with that, but his interviewer on The Project, Mia Freedman, pontificated, “It is conclusively and scientifically incorrect”, and having closed the interview she turned to the panel and played the holocaust card: “When people are actually having scientifically incorrect information that’s incredibly disturbing. I mean, would they get up and support holocaust deniers? This is the same thing essentially”.

After Freedman’s immoderate analogy the hysteria only worsened. Her fellow blogger at Mamamia, Shauna Anderson, wailed: “This Senator just undermined millions of breast cancer sufferers around the world.” Greens MP Adam Bandt thundered, “The minister should not scare young women by peddling his dark, anti-choice ideology on national television” and demanded he apologise.

Further, Bandt stipulated that Abetz not attend the upcoming branch meeting of the World Congress of Families, a homely gathering in a church hall in suburban Melbourne this coming Sunday – free entry, bring your own tea bag - where the co-director of the Sanofi-Aventis Breast Care Centre in New Jersey intends to commit a crime against humanity. Dr Lanfranchi will speak on the question of, “Induced abortion and breast cancer – is there a link and should it be a part of informed consent?”

She thinks it should because she thinks there is, and as a breast cancer expert her evidence should be listened to and argued with respectfully. The political and moral passions about abortion must not paralyse rational discussion of the purely clinical question before us.

Social progressives should take a cold shower. Even if future studies confirm the abortion/ breast cancer link, such a finding would not threaten the sexual revolution, or its ultimate guarantor of abortion on demand. The cancer link, if it exists, would be just another prudential calculation of risk and benefit for the patient, just like the prudential calculation of risk and benefit in using the Pill, which we know is linked very weakly to breast cancer.

Social conservatives should take a cold shower if they think a link between abortion and breast cancer can or should be conscripted to the pro-life cause. Prudential calculations are not the stuff of moral argument. It is honourable to appeal to justice and duty in an attempt to reduce the present killing of every fourth baby in Australia; it is contemptible to appeal to the self-interest of some remote risk of cancer as a reason to let your baby live.

Having all chilled out, let this plausible but unproven factor in the increased breast cancer rates of recent decades be given ongoing cool consideration by experts, free of ideological filters and far from the madding crowd.