Scientists, Govt Ignore Abortion-Breast Cancer Link Leading Surgeon Says 
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by Steven Ertelt
LifeNews.com Editor
March 3, 2008
Washington, DC (LifeNews.com) — A leading breast cancer surgeon has published an article in a top medical journal accusing scientists and the federal government of ignoring the well-established link between abortion and breast cancer. Dr. Angela Lanfranchi, a New Jersey based breast cancer expert, says politics is corrupting science.
She presents her evidence in a new article in the March 2008 issue of the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons.
Lanfranchi, a clinical assistant professor of surgery at the Robert Wood Johnson Medical Center, provided shocking examples to show how federal officials have suppressed information concerning the breast cancer risks related to abortion.
"Informed patient consent for medical treatment is required by both law and medical ethics. Yet, both federal agencies and academicians are participating in the suppression of information about the heightened risk of breast cancer posed by oral contraceptives and induced abortion," she explained.
She said both the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the National Cancer Institute (NCI) have "violated their mission statements" by refusing to acknowledge the abortion-breast cancer link.
Lanfranchi says the NCI "changes its website information frequently — it was revised more than 20 times in the first 7 months of 2007." That hardly gives patients confidence in the information the government agency produces.
She pointed to "blatantly incorrect information" on the National Cancer Institute web site saying that estrogen levels decrease during pregnancy.
The surgeon says the opposite is true, which explains why early first full term pregnancy reduces breast cancer risk and premature birth before 32 weeks and abortion raises risk.
"In fact, pregnancy levels of estrogen increase by 2,000% by the end of the first trimester," the doctor explained. "These same biological facts of breast maturation also account for the increased risk of breast cancer due to induced abortion."
"Either the scientists at the NCI are unaware of this, or they are avoiding the biological explanation of why an early first full-term pregnancy reduces breast cancer risk."
The incorrect information was still present on the NCI web site as of last month.
Lanfranchi also pointed to a 2003 NCI workshop where scientists failed to admit the premature birth-breast cancer link is explained by the same hormonal changes that account for an abortion-breast cancer link.
While the workshop scientists claimed abortion does not increase breast cancer risk, she writes that most studies show the abortion-breast cancer link.
"The basic biological changes that occur during pregnancy account for the increase in breast cancer risk for both induced abortion and premature delivery shown in the preponderance of studies," she wrote.
In fact, Lanfranchi indicated that late-term abortions are particularly damaging to women.
"Until maturation is well underway after 32 weeks gestation, the longer a woman is pregnant before premature delivery or induced abortion, the higher her risk of breast cancer because her breasts have greater numbers of lobules where breast cancers start," she writes.
Lanfranchi cited Leslie Bernstein, an epidemiologist and NCI workshop leader, as an example of how the agency perpetuates the bias.
About the reduction in breast cancer risk that having a baby early in life affords, Bernstein recently told a cancer web site that, “I would never be a proponent of going around and telling them that having babies is the way to reduce your risk.”
Bernstein also said she didn’t think abortion’s link to breast cancer should be part of a discussion about whether abortion should be legal.
Lanfranchi cited errors in textbooks, the reluctance on the part of national breast cancer groups to acknowledge the pregnancy benefit and abortion risk, biased reporting to state legislative officials and other examples of bias from both scientists and NCI and NIH.
"There is an effort to suppress this information by federal agencies and those in academic medicine," Lanfranchi concludes.
"Without this information, women cannot make a fully informed choice about their method of fertility control or about whether to maintain an unplanned pregnancy," she writes. "Medical ethics demands that they be informed."
Related web sites:
Read Dr. Lanfranchi’s article at https://www.jpands.org/vol13no1/lanfranchi.pdf
