Abortion-Breast Cancer Link

Today's WorldNetDaily reports that Joel Brind, Ph.D., president of the Breast Cancer Prevention Institute and a professor at Baruch College of the City University of New York analyzed ten different studies on the possible link between abortions and breast cancer. The findings of his analysis were published in the winter edition of the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons. This was an update of similar work he did in 1996.

In his essay, Brind addresses 10 separate studies conducted between 1996 and 2005 – studies used by those who deny a link between induced abortion and cancer – pointing out problems with the each study's methodology. He asserts those problems skew the results toward the denial of a causal connection between abortion and breast cancer, also known as the ABC link, making them thoroughly unreliable.

Some of the problems Brind encountered included a study in Denmark, where abortion has been legal since 1939. Although the research for this study included records for thousands of women whose abortions were performed before 1973, the study only based its conclusions on the women who had abortions from 1973 and later.

Another study, in Seattle, only looked at 138 women, which is too small a sample to make accurate conclusions (the smaller the sample, the more likely that the results could be way off the norm). And yet this Seattle study's authors, according to Brind, "were nevertheless unjustifiably unequivocal in their conclusion that their 'results do not support a relation between induced abortion and breast cancer incidence.'"

Brind concludes, from looking at these and other studies that actually do find a link, "that induced abortion is indeed a risk factor for breast cancer." Here's the medical explanation for how abortions create that risk:

The basic biology underlying the ABC link boils down to the fact that breast cancer is linked to reproductive hormones, particularly estrogen. At conception, a woman's estrogen levels increase hundreds of times above normal – 2,000 percent by the end of the first trimester. That hormone surge leads to the growth of "undifferentiated" cells in the breast as the body prepares to produce milk for the coming baby.

Undifferentiated cells are vulnerable to the effects of carcinogens, which can give rise to cancerous tumors later in life. In the final weeks of a full-term pregnancy, those cells are "terminally differentiated" through a still largely unknown process and are ready to produce milk. Differentiated cells are not as vulnerable to carcinogens.

However, should a pregnancy be terminated prior to cell differentiation, the woman is left with abnormally high numbers of undifferentiated cells, therefore increasing her risk of developing breast cancer.

Spontaneous abortions, or miscarriages, are not generally associated with increased risk, since they generally occur due to insufficient estrogen hormones to begin with.

In spite of research showing the risk, abortion proponents prefer to claim there's no increased risk of breast cancer, and they quote the faulty studies. This is disingenuous at best.

Meanwhile, I have already warned my friends who have had abortions that they are at risk. Some advice: Breast Self-Exam. Regular mammograms. Above all, don't have abortions.