As October has closed, so does another Breast Cancer Awareness Month. It is a noble and worthy endeavor to raise awareness of this dread disease and how it affects the women we love and their families.
We have indeed made great strides against this disease in all areas: etiology, early detection, and treatment.
However, the National Cancer Institute’s (NCI) pro-abortion political correcting of honestly assessing all areas of causality undercuts the effectiveness of this month’s activities, and leaves millions of women at needless increased risk. Specifically, we need to consider the risks associated with oral contraceptive (OC) use and abortion.
At my blog, I have been analyzing the peer reviewed scientific and medical literature showing the association between OC use, abortion and breast cancer. For a half-century now, well over a hundred studies have indicated a link between abortion and breast cancer, with increased risks being upward of 50% for abortions before a first full-term pregnancy, with many showing increased risks above 100%.
The biological explanation for this link is very simple and has been demonstrated repeatedly in animal studies. Prior to a first full term pregnancy a woman’s breasts are not fully developed, with her lobules made up of immature and cancer-prone Type 1 and Type 2 cells. When she conceives a child, estrogen levels rise dramatically, along with the pregnancy hormone HCG, which stimulate the lobules to undergo massive cell proliferation, roughly doubling in number. These first trimester events leave the woman with twice as many cells where cancer can start.
At the end of the second trimester, the baby begins to protect the mother by secreting the hormone human placental lactogen. This hormone matures the lobule cells into cancer-resistant Type 4 cells, which will produce milk. By the end of the pregnancy 85% of the lobule cells will have undergone this differentiation. The remaining 15% will undergo differentiation to Type 4 Cells during breastfeeding and subsequent pregnancies.
As animal studies bear out, if pregnancy is ended by abortion the woman is left with twice as many immature, cancer-prone cells where cancer can start, but she does not derive the protective effect of the third trimester. OC’s work by the same mechanism of stimulating cell proliferation, without the protective effect of a full term pregnancy. It is simple, elegant, and devastating.
Women who miscarry have abnormally low hormonal levels, and in all studies are shown to be at no increased risk of developing breast cancer.
So where does this political correcting at NCI come from?
Pro-abortion feminist researchers in and associated with the National Cancer Institute convened a panel in 2003 to craft a denial of their own research showing the abortion/breast cancer (ABC) link. Their dismissal of the data was founded on the absurd notion that women with breast cancer are more apt to recall and truthfully report their prior abortions during detailed health histories in research studies than healthy women in the control groups of these studies. This phenomenon is alternately dubbed “recall bias” and “reporting bias”.
Such preposterous thinking is in contravention to the denial that accompanies such devastating disease. If anything, the reverse would be true. However, these researchers suggested that the only valid studies would be those that start in the present and move forward over time. These are known as prospective studies, and are thought to be advantageous over their retrospective counterparts.
But as my ongoing analysis of these studies indicates, these prospective studies are often conducted and funded by the same pro-abortion folks who denied the validity of their own published retrospective studies. These prospective studies, which have purportedly shown no recall bias, are so methodologically flawed, deliberately so, as to literally violate the scientific process.
In the biggest prospective study to allegedly show no ABC link, the Melbye study, the authors began counting breast cancer cases in 1967, but didn’t start a consideration of abortions before 1973. This puts the cases of disease six years before the suspected exposure to the potential cancer-producing cause. I would fail an undergraduate biology student on a research project for making such an obvious blunder. But this is the best study to which the pro-aborts point. But even Melbye’s studies indicate a 3% rise in risk of breast cancer for every week a woman waits to have an abortion, until at 18 weeks gestation her risk rises to 89%.
Further, when Melbye studied premature births, it was found that breast cancer risks are elevated in women who deliver before 32 weeks at the same levels that the retrospective studies establish for women who have induced abortions. Melbye notes the loss of protective effect in these cases of premature delivery. What Melbye refuses to admit is that the sudden end of pregnancy, through either induced abortion or premature birth, are equivalent biological events where the risk of breast cancer is concerned.
So we have progressed through another Breast Cancer Awareness Month where the pro-abortion gang at NCI has conspired to keep the whole truth about risk factors from women, including their chief epidemiologist’s (Dr. Louise Brinton) own paper last year which indicates that women who begin OC use before age 18 are at 540% increased risk of developing the most aggressive and deadly form of breast cancer, triple negative breast cancer.
One wonders why there is not near hysteria in the media over such a catastrophic correlation, especially when Planned Parenthood dispenses OC’s to teens as though they were M&M’s.
It remains for us, the pro-life community, to patiently bring these scientific truths forward. The only force more ruthless and uncaring than the pro-abortion crew at NCI is nature. The laws of physiology and disease are coldly unforgiving of ignorance, political correctness, and willful disobedience. Dr. Louise Brinton and her handpicked coterie of abortion enthusiasts have betrayed women, betrayed scientific integrity, and betrayed their duty to the truth by politically driven machination. Having dug in their heels, we must simply maneuver around them and take the lead.
