Breast Cancer Awareness Months Starts With Magazine Ignoring Abortion Risk
by Steven Ertelt
LifeNews.com Editor
October 4, 2010
Washington, DC (LifeNews.com) — Prevention magazine is coming under fire for a new article written in time for Breast Cancer Awareness Month. The magazine claims abortion has no link to breast cancer and implies scientists don’t understand the disease or ways to prevent it even though carry a pregnancy to term provides a protective effect.
"Twelve myths to ignore about breast cancer" has Prevention magazine claiming "scientists still have no idea what causes breast cancer," "breast cancer is not preventable," and "induced abortion does not increase breast cancer risk."
Karen Malec, the head of the Coalition on Abortion/Breast Cancer says Prevention magazine does a disservice to women because "disease prevention is far better than being cured of that disease — especially when the cure entails the loss of a woman’s breasts, chemotherapy and radiation."
She told LifeNews.com that "if the cancer charity industry had been honest about the risks of the pill, combined with hormone replacement therapy and induced abortion when the evidence became available … many thousands of American lives could have been saved."
Malec says Prevention magazine missed the fact that researchers Jessica Dolle, National Cancer Institute branch chief Louise Brinton, and Dr. Janet Daling and others at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center pointed out in 2009 that abortion is a "known and suspected risk factor" for breast cancer.
The study, appearing in the April, 2009 issue of the prestigious cancer epidemiology journal Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers and Prevention, examined women for triple-negative breast cancer, a subset of breast cancer cases with a particularly aggressive and treatment-resistant cancer type.
When it comes to the abortion link, the study did not produce any new results but it cited the Daling studies from 1994 and 1996 that showed between a 20 and 50 percent increased breast cancer risk for women having abortions compare to those who carried their pregnancies to term and said the studies are still accurate.
"They said unequivocally that induced abortion and oral contraceptive use were risk factors for breast cancer. Although the study is 18 months old, no efforts have been made to inform women nationwide," she said.
Malec says Prevention magazine also ignored the protective effect of having a baby and pointed to the fact that scientists are not at odds about how having a child is helpful in preventing breast cancer.
"Scientists agree the best way to prevent breast cancer is by having more children, starting at an earlier age (before age 24), and breastfeeding for more months during one’s reproductive years," she said.
Meanwhile, Dr. Gerard Nadal, a microbiologist who has a PhD in Molecular Microbiology from St John’s University in New York and has spent 16 years teaching science, most recently at Manhattan College, has been updating his blog to focus on one study every day showing abortion increasing breast cancer risk for women.
Nadal 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 him so many weeks to cover them all, the blogging will continue until early next year.
The first article Nadal covered was 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 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.
Related web sites:
Coalition on Abortion/Breast Cancer – www.AbortionBreastCancer.com
Breast Cancer Prevention Institute – https://www.bcpinstitute.org
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