Another Reason Why Abortion is Bad for Women

A story in the Globe and Mail today reports that the scientific evidence for abortion being a risk factor for breast cancer is a blow to fanatical and irrational political correctness.

"Conservative MP Maurice Vellacott issued a release this week to say he had been vindicated by the National Cancer Institute for making the controversial claim that there is a link between induced abortion and breast cancer. And Mr. Vellacott may be right.

Three years ago, the Saskatchewan MP helped to bring an American doctor and activist to Parliament Hill to tell Canadian women that abortion increases the risk of breast cancer. It turned out that the doctor, Angela Lanfranchi, was speaking from a defined religious point of view that had little apparent basis in science.

And, at the time, the link between the procedure and the disease had been discounted by the National Cancer Institute in the United States, the Society of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists of Canada (and their U.S. counterparts), as well as the Canadian Cancer Society and the Canadian Breast Cancer Network.

But a study released last fall (available here but only for a fee) by the respected Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Institute in Seattle by a number of distinguished cancer experts including Louise Brinton, the chief of the Hormonal and Reproductive Epidemiology Branch of the National Cancer Institute lists induced abortion as being “associated with an increased risk for breast cancer.” Background documents further suggest that it increases the risk of the disease by 40 per cent."

The story is a fair and balanced one that makes the Liberal Party look like irresponsible fanatics more interested in covering up the truth than protecting women's health. They called the Prime Minister to disavow Vellacott's statements. But since when can a politician alter scientific studies by fiat? Actually, contemporary liberals try to do that all the time, which reveals the anti-reason and anti-science basis of radical feminism, the pro-homosexuality movement and the anti-traditional family group.

Life Cycle News reports it this way:

"U.S. National Cancer Institute researcher Dr. Louise Brinton, who was the chief organizer of the National Cancer Institute (NCI) workshop in 2003 that persuaded women that it was "well established" that "abortion is not associated with increased breast cancer risk," has reversed her position and now admits that abortion and oral contraceptives raise breast cancer risks.

The study found that "a statistically significant 40% increased risk for women who have abortions" exists, and that a " 270% increased risk of triple negative breast cancer (an aggressive form of breast cancer associated with high mortality) among those who used oral contraceptives while under age 18 and a 320% increased risk of triple negative breast cancer among recent users (within 1-5 years) of oral contraceptives," also exists.

This means that women who start using OCs before age 18 multiply their risk of TNBC by 3.7 times and recent users of OCs within the last one to five years multiply their risk by 4.2 times.

"Although the study was published nine months ago," stated Karen Malec, president of the Coalition on Abortion/Breast Cancer, in a press release, "the NCI, the American Cancer Society, Susan G. Komen for the Cure and other cancer fundraising businesses have made no efforts to reduce breast cancer rates by issuing nationwide warnings to women."

The liberals who resist all limits on scientific and technological interference in human reproduction accuse conservative of being anti-science and anti-progress. But adjusting the bodies of women for the convenience of men in such a way as to cause them to die young of cancer is not progress. They confuse technology with science and blithely assume that anything a scientist can do should be done just because it is technically feasible. From test tube babies to cloning and surrogate motherhood - if it can be done technically then it is automatically enlightened to do it and anyone who opposes doing it is called anti-science and other names. The reality is that the Pill has contributed to a technological and social revolution that has brought great harm to women, families and ultimately to society as a whole. Both the Pill and abortion hurt women and if anyone is "liberated," it is not women but promiscuous men.

In the future people will look back on this period of history and shake their heads over the way women's bodies had to be butchered, medicated and invaded all in the name of sexual promiscuity. They will wonder why the late 20th and 21st centuries were so dominated by the worst of men and why there were no real feminists to defend the health and bodily integrity of women. They will also wonder why science could be so often suppressed in the name of an irrational and death-dealing ideology, for the sexual revolution is the spear tip of the culture of death.

It is time for men to stand up and take responsibility by not pressuring women to engage in practices like hormonal contraception and abortion that harm them. If men were willing to be responsible in their relations with women, then women would not feel pressured to do what they now feel society expects of them. But women also have the responsibility to say no to the strong social pressure to be sexually available even at the expense of their own health.

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UPDATE: You might want to check out this link to a blog on "About.com" which is owned by the New York Times. So it is hardly a "right-wing pro-life organization." Also, Jill Stanek has a good summary of the political fall-out so far from the new NCI study. Women should be up in arms about this manipulation and deceit and they should be burning their birth control pills on the steps of the big pharmaceutical companies that have gotten rich off their exploitation.