Microbiologist: Hundreds of Studies Confirm Abortion-Breast Cancer Link

National   |   Steven Ertelt   |   Sep 21, 2010   |   9:00AM   |   WASHINGTON, DC

Microbiologist: Hundreds of Studies Confirm Abortion-Breast Cancer Link

by Steven Ertelt
LifeNews.com Editor
September 21
, 2010

Washington, DC (LifeNews.com) — A microbiologist says there are so many published studies confirming the link between induced abortion and breast cancer that he plans to publish one every day on his blog until he’s mentioned them all. It will take Dr. Gerard Nadal so many weeks to cover them all, the blogging will continue until early next year.

Nadal, who has a has a PhD in Molecular Microbiology from St John’s University in New York, has spent 16 years teaching science, most recently at Manhattan College.

He will report on one abortion-breast cancer study daily until he has exhausted all of the abortion-breast cancer studies and he anticipates he may be reporting on these studies as late as January or February of 2011.

"Today begins the inexorable presentation of the scientific literature on the abortion/breast cancer link," Nadal writes. "Women’s lives depend on us getting the truth out to them. In short order we’ll generate plenty of pros armed with the simple truth of science!"

His first article reviews a 1997 epidemiological study by Julie Palmer, Lynn Rosenberg and their colleagues, "Induced and spontaneous abortion in relation to breast cancer," published in the journal, Cancer Causes and Control.

Palmer and Rosenberg are not unbiased researchers, which makes their findings even more relevant for women. Instead, they are abortion advocates who have testified as expert witnesses on behalf of abortion businesses in lawsuits challenging the states of Alaska and Florida because of their parental notice or consent laws.

Their study, supported by U.S. National Cancer Institute grants, examined 1,835 women ages 25-64 years with pathologically confirmed, invasive breast cancer and 4,289 women aged 25-64 admitted for nonmalignant or malignant conditions.

Nadal says the study found women who had never had children and who had one case of an induced abortion raised their abortion breast cancer risk by 40 percent.

"So in plain English, women who had one induced abortion, regardless of ever having had a child, had a 40% increased risk of developing breast cancer over women the same age, with the same parity status who never had abortions, and the authors are 95% certain that there is no other explanation," he said.

Nadal says the study further showed that for women who had a child previously, "there is a 30% increased risk of cancer" and it "may well be explained by additional stimulation of the lobules by estrogen in the aborted pregnancy, without the benefit of lactogen at the end."

Nadal says observers of the debate about the abortion and breast cancer link should pay attention to another part of the study where the authors attempt to undermine their own results in an effort to downplay the abortion-breast cancer link.

The authors claim their own study suffers from a form of recall bias — despite their assertion that they were 95% certain that the results could not be due to chance. The authors believe women with breast cancer are less likely to hide their abortion from the health questioners compiling the data than women without breast cancer.

"They offer no proof of this phenomenon other than the same assertions made by other breast cancer researchers with similar data. In other words, the phenomenon is a baseless assertion reverberating in the pro-abortion echo chamber," Nadal writes.

"Are we really to believe that breast cancer brings women closer to telling the truth of their previous abortions? Why the acuity of memory in a breast cancer patient vs. the control patients? The abortion question was just one in a long, detailed history taken during the study," Nadal continues. "There is no rational basis for believing that women with breast cancer are more apt to recall and report an abortion than any other women."

Despite that, the authors conclude in their study: “The small elevations in risk observed in the present study and in previous studies are compatible with what would be expected if there were differential underreporting by cases and controls.”

Nadal says that doesn’t pass the scientific straight face test.

"If I had pulled that crap during my dissertation defense, my committee would have laughed me out of the room," he said.

However, as Nadal blogs about the abortion-breast cancer studies, he says this is a recurring theme.

"But, as we shall see over and over on a daily basis for months to come, this is what happens when ideology (and not physiology) becomes the prism through which data are filtered," he says.

 

Sign Up for Free Pro-Life News From LifeNews.com

Daily Pro-Life News Report Twice-Weekly Pro-Life
News Report
Receive a free daily email report from LifeNews.com with the latest pro-life news stories on abortion, euthanasia and stem cell research. Sign up here. Receive a free twice-weekly email report with the latest pro-life news headlines on abortion, euthanasia and stem cell research. Sign up here.