Agenda Over Women's Health: LAT Continues Abortion Falsehoods

By Dave Pierre (Bio | Archive)
January 18, 2008 - 05:24 ET

In the article, "Abortions down 25% from peak" (Thu. 1/17/08), the Los Angeles Times continues their practice of propagating abortion falsehoods. But their faulty reporting exceeds simple factual errors. Their falsehoods put women's lives in jeopardy.

In a passage on the activities at pro-life crisis pregnancy centers, the author of the article, Stephanie Simon (more on her below), writes,

Some of the material given to women at such sessions [at these centers] is false or misleading -- for example, warnings that abortion raises the risk of breast cancer or causes post-traumatic stress disorder.

First - The Times and Simon, despite the loads of evidence contradicting them, continue to deny the numerous studies asserting the link between abortion and an increased risk of breast cancer ("ABC" = "abortion-breast cancer"). They are wrong to do this, and we have cited Simon and the paper on this very issue before (here and here). In addition, as recently as three months ago (October 2007), a major study conducted out of England concluded that abortion is the "best predictor" for developing breast cancer. (See also this.)

Abortion defenders (like the Times and Simon) like to point to a 2007 study by Harvard researchers that deny the ABC link. However, the study has been found to contain "serious methodological concerns [that] cast doubt on the validity of the overall  result" (source). (See also this and this.) Likewise, a widely reported 2003 workshop by the National Cancer Institute (NCI) that claimed to deny the ABC link has also been found to be seriously faulty. The NCI workshop has been tagged as a "scam." Rather than seeking the truth, it was perceived that "eradicating the ABC link was really the sole purpose of the meeting." (Source) (See also these important notes from the Breast Cancer Prevention Institute.)

Second - The Times is also grossly irresponsible to deny that abortion causes post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in many women. For starters, a 2004 article in the Medical Science Monitor on post-abortive women concluded that 65% of American women in the study experienced multiple symptoms of PTSD and 14.3% "met the full diagnostic criteria for PTSD." (Rue VM, Coleman PK, Rue JJ, Reardon DC. Induced abortion and traumatic stress: A preliminary comparison of American and Russian women. Med Sci Monit, 2004 10(10): SR5-16). Since 2001, several peer-reviewed studies have found a connection between abortion and adverse effects on women's mental health (source/source). (More info at: The Silent No More Awareness Campaign; Rachel's Vineyard; the Elliot Institute; and the book Forbidden Grief: The Unspoken Pain of Abortion by Theresa Burke.)

It should be extremely unsettling that the Times and Ms. Simon continue to prioritize political agenda over honesty and women's health. We've reported several times on Simon's journalistic malfeasance on the abortion issue. (See here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.) Why can't the Times and Ms. Simon stop their misinformation campaign? Don't they realize lives are at stake?

Ms. Simon and the Times should take to heart the words of Dr. Janet Daling. Dr. Daling is a pro-choice doctor who was commissioned by the NCI in the 1990's to study the issue of abortion and breast cancer. Her 1994 NCI journal article did indeed affirm an ABC link. And because of her findings, she was excoriated by abortion defenders. Here is what she told the Los Angeles Daily News in 1997 (link):

I have three sisters with breast cancer, and I resent people messing with the scientific data to further their own agenda, be they pro-choice or pro-life. I would have loved to have found no association between breast cancer and abortion, but our research is rock solid, and our data is accurate. It's not a matter of believing, it's a matter of what is.

And another "matter of what is" is that the Los Angeles Times continues to propagate falsehoods on the abortion issue.

—Dave Pierre is the creator of TheMediaReport.com and a contributor to NewsBusters.


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As one of the two mainstays

January 18, 2008 - 05:42 ET by ConservativeRex

As one of the two mainstays of the religion of liberalism (the other being the teachers unions) these pro-killers will fight tooth and nail, concoct any falsehood, and propagate any slander towards any one or thing that questions the validity of killing human beings.

Pro-killers such as this Simon need to be confronted every time they dare print their propaganda.  Of course their methods and conclusions need to be questioned, at every turn. For every article they print with their faulty statistics, we need to hammer them with the facts and not sugar coat a damn thing.

Call them what they are, killers, plain and simple. Refine them down to the lowest denominator, it's time we made sure their viewpoint and them personally are ostracized. The only thing at stake is life itself. The womans, and her unborn baby.

Well, Mr. Pierre it's

January 18, 2008 - 07:30 ET by motherbelt

Well, Mr. Pierre it's obvious that you are a right-wing extremist who just wants to oppress women. Just like all those other "fundamentalists" who have "problems" with their Harvard study, and those who want women to have to see sonograms before their "procedure" and want them to be told about the option of adoption. You don't care that it's the woman who has to be fat and uncomfortable for nine months and then go through labor...you probably don't even care about the breast cancer..you just want to frighten women out of having abortions because you want to keep them barefoot and pregnant so you and your ilk don't have to deal with them out in the real world and the workplace. So just butt out....this is a "women's reproductive health issue"! Got it? Good!

<sarc off>

This is just another example of the feminazis sticking their fingers in their ears and singing LALALALALA on this issue. They don't want women to hear anything that might deter them from abortion.

 

→ MB

January 18, 2008 - 07:48 ET by Cool Arrow

I adjure you to cease and desist from sarcing off in Channel.

<sarc off>

I ♣ My Seal

Excellent Topic Dave

January 18, 2008 - 12:51 ET by stratman

From what I have read, the question of whether or not breast cancer incidence is increased in those women with a past history of induced abortion is still not fully established. 

I would think a more ambitious protocol, like the Framingham Heart Study started in 1948 and continuing today, would be conducive to determining disease rates rather than a ten year study of the Harvard Nurses' Health Study II.  Except for some nasty fast growing breast cancers that are found in younger women, ten years is hardly enough time for the true incidence rate to be expressed in women of such varying ages at enrollment in the study.

I am a bit troubled by the alledged exclusion of the actual lead investigator who believes an abortion-breast cancer link is true, Dr. Brind, as presenter in the National Cancer Institute Workshop in 2003.  Instead, another researcher was invited to give that position despite her work not being in that specific area.  There is an appearance of calculated exlusion and minimizing the opposing voice/data in an area of research that is relatively new and lacking in corroborative studies.

As much as some people appear to want this issue to vanish, the science is incomplete.  Stiffling opposing data is how one gets bad medicine just as much as accepting something entirely without critical review because it sounds "good".  As one of the links mentioned, Medicine was wrong about the relationship of estrogen hormone replacement therapy for postmenopausal women for years due to a dogmatic acceptance of years old (incomplete but) well meaning and rationally sounding conclusions derived fourty to fifty years ago.  Ritual and dogma are very difficult to eradicate in the medical community, requiring overwhelming data to the contrary before correction occurs.

I hope someone begins a long term study to resolve this question to the satisfaction of most on both sides.  Afterall, it is our families, friends and ourselves that are at risk.  We all deserve to make reasoned decisions about our health choices without politics and unscientific methodology interferring (eg Global Warming discussion "over") .

 

Killing them with kindness isn't working.  Time to get scrappy with the Donkeys.

→ Strat

January 18, 2008 - 13:02 ET by Cool Arrow

But isn't this one of those issues statistically demonstrable but socially unacceptable? 

Sort of like absentee fathers cause academic failure among offspring?  Or Welfare begets Welfare?

You can prove it, but isn't it inevitably disregarded and labeled hate speech?

I ♣ My Seal

I would not doubt thare are

January 18, 2008 - 20:32 ET by stratman

I do not doubt there are physicians and scientists that feel this way.  A higher education does not prevent personal prejudices and blindspots.  Anthropogenic Global Warming is the biggest and best example in modern times of how these pinheads operate.

Killing them with kindness isn't working.  Time to get scrappy with the Donkeys.

I agree, we need a serious

January 18, 2008 - 13:46 ET by cleverpig

I agree, we need a serious long-term study to address this. I don't know a lot about this issue, so I reaqd several of the articles linked here. Here are a few issues I have with the purported link:

The only causal factor that seems unambiguously to link abortion with breast cancer is the delay in 1st full-term birth. While that is a real effect (to my brief reading), there are many other factors that delay 1st births, and some abortions that do not delay 1st full-term birth. If that's the only strong link we can come up with, then saying "abortions cause breast cancer" is sensationalist. Aftrer all, higher education also delays 1st births, and we don't say "college causes breast cancer." Similarly, abortions by women who already have kids would do nothing to their risk for breat cancer.

Also, the critique of the Harvard nurses study cites as commonly accepted the fact that spontaneous abortions haven't shown to increase breast cancer risk. And yet, all of the reason cited for why abortions are bad would apply to spontaneous as well as induced abortions. To me, that says that we don't really know why induced abortions are linked to breast cancer, and that throws doubt on the idea that one causes the other. Instead, both incidence of induced abortions and breast cancer may be affected by a third factor that we haven't detected yet.

I still think that women should be appraised of this risk, but it should be part of breast health education, not abortion education. The fact is that having babies is good for women when it goes well. Babies make us smarter, for example. I still think it should be a choice because of all the other ways in which a baby can affect your life, positive and negative.

You bring up an excellent

January 18, 2008 - 17:09 ET by stratman

You bring up an excellent point concerning "causal" versus "casual" relationships.  "Causal" relationships, simplified, are direct linear events which culminate in a specific outcome.  An example would be that people that smoke have a much higher incidence of lung cancer than nonsmokers.  A 'casual" relationship is an unproven triggering event or a confounder that appears to be involved in the specific outcome.  An example would be nonsmokers that know smokers do get lung cancer too, but knowing a smoker does not (neccesarily) increase one's risk for lung cancer.

An example of advocacy concerning breast cancer risk reduction via breastfeeding is the position by Le Leche League (as well as the traditional medical societies like ACOG, AAP, AAFP) which push their agenda ad nauseum.  Some sites like Breastfeeding.com use the 60's styled revolutionary methodology - a take no prisoners mentality - proudly displaying their "advocacy" bonafides and militancy towards those that bottlefeed or produce the food.

I am all for woman that would like to breastfeed.  The benefits have been well established.  I am also a supporter of those that want to bottlefeed, of which the benefits have also been well established.  I am against those that would bully and cajole women to one method or the other.

The point about breastfeeding I want to make is that by obtaining abortions one does prevent breastfeeding from occuring, thereby increasing one's risk for breast cancer in the future.  Did the Harvard Nurses study account for:

  • nulliparous women

  • women who had one or more pregnancies of which all were aborted and those abortions further subdivided into induced versus spontaneous

  • women with prior pregnancies carried to term and delivered who then had an abortion with a subsequent pregnancy

  • women with prior abortions who subsequently became pregnant and delivered and no further abortions thereafter

  • Length of pregnancy prior to abortion as affects risk of breast cancer 

  • Long enough length of study - a 26 year old may not be diagnosed with breast cancer till her 40-50's or even later

  • etc?

I didn't see the Harvard study account for all these factors/questions.  I'll need to go back and check.

Current medical dogma on this topic is summed up neatly by:

"Breast cancer risk has traditionally been linked to nulliparity or late first full-term pregnancy, whereas young age at first childbirth, multiparity, and breast-feeding are associated with a reduced risk."

Yet, there is no research that has been reproduced which can assert definitively that there is or is not a direct link between induced abortion and breast cancer. There is no research on the magnitude of the Framingham Study to support conclusions.  Even the estrogen replacement hormone outcomes data took greater than ten years to accumulate before there was sufficient data to change the medical community's practices.  There is currently plenty of inferential, anecdotal and short term data to support the causal link and validate the question of risk, but this must be further studied despite the nay-saying political and emotive activists' declarations that "the discussion is over".

Let's hope this doesn't further deteriorate into an ideological "flat-earther" accusation type of discussion.

Killing them with kindness isn't working.  Time to get scrappy with the Donkeys.

ideological "flat-earther" accusation type

January 18, 2008 - 17:28 ET by Pam

Well said. 

I am going to disagree with you Dave

January 18, 2008 - 13:22 ET by Pam

I do not doubt that women suffer psychologically after having an abortion, but I am not going to call it post-traumatic stress disorder.  It is called guilt or shame..

As to your studies, I went to the American Cancer Society and did my own research.  It is lengthy but well worth the time. http://www.cancer.org/docroot/CRI/content/CRI_2_6x_Can_Having_an_Abortion_Cause_or_Contribute_to_Breast_Cancer.asp

The largest, and probably the most reliable, single study of this topic was conducted during the 1990s in Denmark, a country with very detailed medical records on all its citizens. In that study, all Danish women born between 1935 and 1978 (1.5 million women) were linked with the National Registry of Induced Abortions and with the Danish Cancer Registry. So all information about their abortions and their breast cancer came from registries, was very complete, and was not influenced by recall bias.

After adjusting for known breast cancer risk factors, the researchers found that induced abortion(s) had no overall effect on the risk of breast cancer. The size of this study and the manner in which it was done provides substantial evidence that induced abortion does not affect a woman's risk of developing breast cancer.

Another large, prospective study was reported on by Harvard researchers in 2007. This study included more than 100,000 women who were between the ages of 29 and 46 at the start of the study in 1993. These women were followed until 2003. Again, because they were asked about their reproductive history at the start of the study, recall bias was unlikely to be a problem. After adjusting for known breast cancer risk factors, the researchers found no link between either spontaneous or induced abortions and breast cancer.

This had me intrigued as well:

In February 2003, the US National Cancer Institute (NCI) held a workshop of more than 100 of the world’s leading experts who study pregnancy and breast cancer risk. The experts reviewed existing human and animal studies on the relationship between pregnancy and breast cancer risk, including studies of induced and spontaneous abortions. Among their conclusions were:

  • Breast cancer risk is temporarily increased after a term pregnancy (that is, a pregnancy that results in the birth of a living child). 
  • Induced abortion is not associated with an increase in breast cancer risk. 
  • Recognized spontaneous abortion is not associated with an increase in breast cancer risk.

The level of scientific evidence for these conclusions

was considered to be "well established" (the highest level).

Let's stick to what we know about abortion:

Abortion is murder.  It may be legal, but you are murdering a child.  You will carry that guilt with you for the rest of your life.

Abortion my lead to reproductive problems.  In some cases, women can no longer have children

 

→ Pam

January 18, 2008 - 13:33 ET by Cool Arrow

Thanks for the legwork.

Sticking with what we know is a good admonition.

I ♣ My Seal

Thanks, but

January 18, 2008 - 14:39 ET by Dave Pierre

Thanks for the response, but above I specifically address how serious flaws in the 2007 study and the 2003 "workshop" have been identified! That NCI workshop was tagged as a "scam." I highly encourage you to explore and study the links I have provided.

As for the 1990's Danish study, 60,000 older women who had abortions were excluded from the study.

Here are two articles (pdf files) that address all three faulty studies.

The Abortion-Breast Cancer Link by Angela Lanfranchi, MD, FACS

The Abortion-Breast Cancer Connection Dr. Joel Brind, PhD

Thank you.

Concerning the Danish

January 18, 2008 - 18:52 ET by stratman

Concerning the Danish study, from Is Abortion Related to Breast Cancer? Too Political to Address by Ellen Rice:

""Specifically, fully one-fourth of the Melbye cohort was born between the years 1968-1978, all of whom were under age 25 at the end of the study. Hence they were too young to account for more than 8 cases of breast cancer, while accounting for some 40,000 abortions. In like manner, the oldest one-fourth of the Melbye cohort, born between 1935-1945, contained most of the breast cancer patients, yet they were too old to have most of their abortion histories - which registry only commenced in 1973 - recorded in the computer registry."

So one-fourth of the Melbye sample were too old to have had their abortion histories reliably recorded. Another fourth was too young to be followed forward through middle-age, when women typically get breast cancer. This huge flaw in 50% of the Melbye cohort should have been obvious to anyone who has studied high school mathematics."

Even seemingly well done studies can have major flaws.  The older woman were less likely to have documented abortion in their medical histories.  The youngest cohort of women who had abortions had not reached the typical age for a diagnosis of breast cancer by study's end, though they represented ~11% of the total number of abortions reported (40000/370000 abortions).  Both of these data points skewed the results in favor of no increased (relative?) risk for breast cancer.

I don't know the veracity of the above quoted statements because I have not read the entire Danish study, but I did find this interesting in the abstract:

Results In the cohort of 1.5 million women (28.5 million person-years), we identified 370,715 induced abortions among 280,965 women (2.7 million person-years) and 10,246 women with breast cancer. After adjustment for known risk factors, induced abortion was not associated with an increased risk of breast cancer (relative risk, 1.00; 95 percent confidence interval, 0.94 to 1.06). No increases in risk were found in subgroups defined according to age at abortion, parity, time since abortion, or age at diagnosis of breast cancer. The relative risk of breast cancer increased with increasing gestational age of the fetus at the time of the most recent induced abortion: <7 weeks, 0.81 (95 percent confidence interval, 0.58 to 1.13); >12 weeks, 1.38 (1.00 to 1.90) (reference category, 9 to 10 weeks).

Conclusions Induced abortions have no overall effect on the risk of breast cancer.

SO, cancer risk DOES go up with increasing age of the fetus at termination BUT no overall effect on cancer risk due to abortion is concluded.  That says to me that there IS and increased risk from abortion, at least dependent upon fetal age, but somehow this risk is negated or the researchers have excluded it from their conclusions.

Adding to my uncertainty is a blurb - is this real? - I read yesterday that abstracts from major medical journals differ from the data of the actual paper up to 68% of the time!  I regularly peruse a couple of these journals, oftentimes gleaning the abstracts for a quick learn.  Now I need to read the article more closely.  Boo!  (Note the "delicious" irony of my using the linked abstract to detail the innacuracies of abstracts in general.)

In all fairness, I had never heard about a connection between abortion and breast cancer.  I am skeptical of entities like Dr. Brind that advocate something that appears so contrary to current medical evidence.  (Since there are more conceptions/pregnancies terminated spontaneously than actual pregnancies carried with live births, how does one even account for the large numbers of suspected or unknown spontaneous abortions in this equation?)  But I have become more flexible and smarter to acknowledge and be openminded about potential scientific paradigm changes as the data presents itself.  I am also aware that there are egotistical political activists in Medicine who carry enough clout to shape Medicine to their desire.  For centuries is was men that cotrolled and shaped Medicine but now it is more and more special interest groups of which there is a sizable women contingent.  This not necessarily bad but it does lead to abuses of power just as sure as there were when Medicine was a paternalistic fraternity.

Finally, the following quote sums up how the medical community should behave regardless of emotional, political, religious or financial position:

In an editorial response to the furor raised by Dr. Joel Brind’s landmark 1996 meta-analysis confirming that a preponderance of the data supported the ABC link, Dr. Stuart Donnan, editor-in-chief of the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health, suggested the following to his “pro-choice” colleagues:

I believe that if you take a view (as I do), which is often called “pro-choice,” you need at the same time to have a view which might be called “pro-information” without excessive paternalistic censorship (or interpretation) of the data.

Whether it's Medicine or Global Warming, Mankind suffers when science is silenced.

Killing them with kindness isn't working.  Time to get scrappy with the Donkeys.

Pam: Something else that

January 18, 2008 - 20:31 ET by stratman

Pam:

Something else that bothered me from the 2003 NCI conclusions was

"Breast cancer risk is temporarily increased after a term pregnancy (that is, a pregnancy that results in the birth of a living child)."

Why is this so?  The answer is "predisposition"

Following fertilization, estrogen hormone increases in the woman's body.  Along with other later hormonal surges the woman's breasts change and begin to make colostrum (milk).  If the woman also has a dormant cancer cell already in her breast, most commonly found in the milk ducts where much of the pregnancy induced changes of the breast are occuring, then the cancer cell may become activated and multiply resulting in breast cancer in a few years for a young woman instead of in middle age or older for most diagnosed cancers.  (For more info in laypeople language, see here, with attention to chapters 2 and 8 for pertinent discussion.) 

The NCI conclusion appears contradictory.  If cancer is already predisposed in the woman, and the surge of estrogen following conception causes the cancer cell(s) to awaken and multiply, then how does increased relative risk (RR) only occur when the pregnancy is carried FULL TERM?  Isn't the RR increased beginning with conception?  Does this RR increase only occur with specific types of breast cancer, such as the BRCA mutations, but not all breast cancer types?

I would think that the preponderance of these types of cancers would be estrogen sensitive.  Therefore they could be subdivided by 1) time of  pregnancy/abortion to diagnosis, and, 2) genetic and biochemical markers specific for breast cancer BRCA genes and estrogen reseptors on the cancer cells themselves.  Since not all breast cancers are estrogen dependent/sensitive, are there any statistical differences in the type of cancers seen in aborted pregnancies versus term pregnancies versus never pregnant females?  What are the differences in cancer rates between various lengths of pregnancies since maturation of the breast for nursing does not happen immediately?   How do you know their was a dormant cancer cell to begin with and not a genetic mutation triggered by different event?  Were any of these woman on estrogen birth control pills/injections/implants that might have increased their risk ofr breast cancer?  Has there been an increase in breast cancer that coincides with the rates of abortions performed, since you would expect a fairly linear response?

So, is the NCI conclusion a confounder or does it reflect valid, reproducible science?  There are many questions to be asked before saying the science is concluded.  I would like a well devised and controlled study along the lines of the Danish and Harvard studies to see if the results are reproducible before believing the discussion is over.

 

Killing them with kindness isn't working.  Time to get scrappy with the Donkeys.