Abortion-Breast Cancer Link is Real, Pregnancy Reduces Risk, Researcher Says
by Steven Ertelt
LifeNews.com Editor
February 23, 2009
New York, NY (LifeNews.com) — Baruch College professor and renowned researcher Joel Brind, Ph.D., is one of the world’s leading experts on the link between abortion and breast cancer. He says that the link between the two is real and that studies back up his assertion that carrying a pregnancy to term reduces the risk.
In an interview with The Ticker, the Baruch College student newspaper, Brind explains how having an abortion can lead to a higher risk of contracting the disease.
"That’s what the big research argument is about: does abortion increase the risk of breast cancer beyond not getting pregnant in the first place? And the answer is yes," Brind says.
Brind explains that the reason for the link is "obvious" in that "once a woman gets pregnant, her breasts start growing within days or a week or so after getting pregnant. So the number of those Type 1 and Type 2 lobules where breast cancer can form are multiplying and so there are more places where cancer can start as the pregnancy proceeds."
"Well, once 32 weeks pass, all those Type 1 and Type 2 lobules become Type 3 and Type 4 lobules so you actually have fewer places for cancer to form than before the pregnancy started. But if a pregnancy is aborted before the 32-week mark, the risk for breast cancer goes way up from where it would have been even if a woman hadn’t gotten pregnant in the first place," he said.
While much of the focus of the debate is on the abortion side of the breast cancer issue, Brind says there is little controversy about the fact that pregnancy helps women.
"No one argues with the fact that when a woman has a full-term pregnancy, breast cancer risk goes down," he told the Thinker newspaper.
"When you look at the medical literature there is acknowledgement that a woman has a lowered risk of breast cancer from a full-term pregnancy and that the same lowered risk of breast cancer is not afforded a woman who has had an aborted pregnancy," he said.
The professor also talked about recall bias — something abortion advocates have used to try to criticize the studies Brind and others have conducted showing the link.
He said places where there is more accurate medical data about women who had abortions make it easier to draw accurate conclusions. And, in those cases, the conclusion is clear.
"When a woman gets an abortion in New York State she has to file a fetal death certificate, which is medical record-based, not recall-based. It’s not based on a woman remembering whether or not she had an abortion. And guess what? There was a 90 percent increase in breast cancer and this was published in 1989," he said.
"I did a complete review of a decade’s worth of studies like that which was published in the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons in 2005," Brind added, saying the overall analysis showed the abortion-breast cancer link exists.
Brind told the Thinker that a lot of his work has been looking into the science behind the studies others conduct and determining if they are valid.
"My career in this particular area over the last 10 plus years has not been so much studying the abortion/breast cancer connection as it has been studying the papers which cover it up," he said.
"The abortion/breast cancer link is something that’s real, so a study that’s done well would support the link. So I’m usually pretty confident I can find out why the abortion/breast cancer link doesn’t show [in a study] when it’s there," he added.
The cover up extends to some governmental and professional groups such as the National Cancer Institute, that have issued politicized opinions claiming no abortion-breast cancer link exists. Brind talked about that meeting as well.
"In 2003 there was a scientific ‘workshop’ of 100 invited scientists from around the world that was basically held to throw me and my findings under the bus and to prove that there is this scientific consensus dismissing the link between breast cancer and abortion. But there’s nothing scientific about a consensus. That’s an oxymoron," Brind concluded.
"The official position [of NCI and such groups] is that there is no link between abortion and breast cancer, but of course there is," he said.
For more information on the abortion-breast cancer link, visit the Breast Cancer Prevention Institute’s web site at https://www.BCPInstitute.org
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