Finally, last October, I and colleagues from the Penn State College of Medicine in Hershey published a "Comprehensive Review and Meta-analysis" on ABC in the British Medical Association’s Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health¹. Our finding of significantly increased risk in the totality of worldwide medical literature garnered headlines, but only momentarily. And the main-stream organs of public health policy and the media have wasted no time in using their power and prestige to bury the truth about the single most avoidable risk factor for breast cancer: induced abortion.

Indeed, the overall, highly significant positive association between induced abortion and breast cancer, which we have documented in the meta-analysis, demands that women be warned at the very least. Such warnings are already mandated to be given to any women considering induced abortion by law in Louisiana, Montana and Mississippi, with more such laws in the pipeline.

Finally, we are not speaking here about any concern for the life of any fetuses: only about the life and health of the women who may be able to take these abortifacient drugs.

However safe this drug regimen may appear in short term testing, there is too much hard evidence that in the long term, many thousands of women will get breast cancer because they took these drugs. If this agency can simply approve, as the Population Council has requested, the legitimate use of such drugs by healthy women in order to achieve elective medical results, then we will have witnessed, in effect, the end of the Food and Drug Administration as we know it, for this agency will have abandoned its function to protect American women from purveyors of harmful medicine.

"Dubious studies on negligible environmental risks trigger apocalyptic front-page headlines with numbing regularity ... yet abortion-breast cancer research, over 40 individual studies, is largely shunned by the mainstream media."

When researchers at Penn State University announced that they had discovered that abortion is to blame for about 5,000 cases of breast cancer each year, those who thought the media would finally sit up and take notice were once again disappointed.

Dr. Joel Brind received a positive response for his presentation of the abortion/breast cancer risk at the World Conference On Breast Cancer. Here is Dr. Brind's account of the proceedings:

It was encouraging and somewhat surprising to have an update of our "Comprehensive review and meta-analysis" on induced abortion and breast cancer accepted for presentation at the July [1997] "World Conference on Breast Cancer" in Kingston, Ontario. The conference was organized by veteran pro-abortion activist Bella Abzug in her capacity as president of Women's Environment and Development Organization.

The original paper, which I had written in collaboration with colleagues from Penn State College of Medicine in Hershey, was published in the British Medical Association's Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health last October. My presentation in Ontario centered on several additional studies essentially confirming our original finding of 30% increased risk of breast cancer attributable to abortion. Nothing is more an article of faith for radical feminists such as Bella Abzug than that abortion is indispensable to women's equality.

Therefore I expected that the room would be largely empty -- especially given that there were five other concurrent sessions -- for such an against-the-grain presentation. But to my surprise, not only was the room full, but the attentive audience included Ms. Abzug herself.

As readers may recall, our meta-analysis found that 24 out of the 30 epidemiological studies published worldwide since 1957 have confirmed the abortion-breast cancer (ABC) link. More recent publications supporting and challenging the ABC link were discussed in my presentation in Kingston.

For one, there is the continuing heated debate about the Melbye study from Denmark published in this January's New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM). The U.S. National Cancer Institute and others continue to maintain that it disproved the ABC link. The World Conference provided me the opportunity to point out the serious flaws in the Melbye study, as had been done in an article published in National Right to Life News (5/23/97), and in a letter to the editor, which appeared in the June 19 edition of NEJM.

Among other egregious flaws, Melbye, et al., had misclassified some 60,000 women in the study as not having had any abortions who actually did have legal abortions on record!

For another, there was the Rookus study on Dutch women published last December in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute (JNCI). Readers may remember how the authors of this well-designed study found a 90% risk increase with abortion, but then proceeded to explain it away on the basis of something called "reporting bias".

This curious argument holds that the ABC link only appears to exist because women with breast cancer are more likely to admit having had abortions than are healthy women. As a result, they say, studies which depend on women reporting their reproductive histories (as most studies do) will show an artificially elevated risk.

The authors of the Dutch study claimed to have evidence of reporting bias. But as was demonstrated both to readers of NRL News (12/10/96) and readers of the April 12 edition of JNCI, by way of another letter to the editor, it was this so-called evidence which had been artificially manufactured.

It was the JNCI editorial that accompanied the Dutch study which the journal's editors (who are also high-ranking NCI officials) used to attack our meta-analysis by name. They claimed we had made "a leap beyond the bounds of inference" for inferring a causal link between abortion and breast cancer.

In our letter rebutting these charges, we pointed out how, rather than relying solely on the statistical link, a causal association was also supported by the biological facts, namely:

1."Estrogens are strong growth promoters of normal and most cancerous breast tissue.

2.Most known risk factors for breast cancer are attributable to some form of estrogen overexposure.

3.Maternal estradiol (estrogen) rises 20-fold (2,000%) during the first trimester of a normal pregnancy. Estrogen makes breast tissue grow, including potentially cancerous tissue. If the pregnancy is completed, other hormones cause the breast tissue to differentiate into milk-producing tissue. If pregnancy isn't completed, the excess estrogen leaves the tissue free to grow into abnormal or even cancerous cells.

4.But "pregnancies which abort spontaneously (miscarry) usually generate subnormal amounts of estradiol; no increased risk of breast cancer is seen.

5.The incidence of breast cancer is dramatically increased in rats whose pregnancies are aborted."

Most newsworthy in this regard, as I stated in Kingston, was the fact that, in the editors' response to our letter in the JNCI, not one of these biological facts was challenged!

Then there was the intriguing news about the mysterious appearance of the ABC link in Australian women. This evidence had been suppressed for seven years.

Back in 1988, a study on dietary risk factors for breast cancer in Australian women was published in the American Journal of Epidemiology. However, the study, principally authored by Dr. T.E. Rohan (now in Toronto with the National Cancer Institute of Canada), also listed standard risk factors -- including reproductive history and family history. None of these factors had a statistically significant impact on Australian women in the study (except for removal of the ovaries). Abortion was never mentioned in the 1988 paper.

Continued

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