It was a 1995 paper, principally authored by a French researcher Nadine Andrieu, where the Rohan data on abortion made its first appearance. And it showed a statistically significant 160% breast cancer risk increase among women who had chosen abortion, much stronger even than family history in these Australian women.

Why were the abortion data suppressed for seven years? Dr Rohan acknowledged, in a phone call I placed to him, that with the politically sensitive status of abortion, he had never even tried to include the results on abortion -- the strongest connection he found in the original 1988 paper.
"Canada's national newspaper", the Globe and Mail (July 15) called my presentation "one of the most controversial" of the Kingston conference. Indeed, it provoked many questions from the audience, the first from Ms. Abzug herself.

She wanted to know, if induced abortion increases breast cancer risk, how could Japan, which has had a high abortion rate for decades, have the world's lowest breast cancer rate? The answer which was explained in detail to the Kingston audience (as well as NRLNews readers [4/6/95]) is simple.

Four epidemiological studies on Japanese women have been published since 1957. All show increased risk, with an average risk increase of about 100%. All these studies were scientifically correct: they compared Japanese women who had undergone an abortion to Japanese women who had not -- not to women from the U.S. or anywhere else. And in Japan, where breast cancer risk in the absence of abortion is about 2%, abortion doubles it to about 4% -- still much lower than the U.S. breast cancer rate.

Other provocative questions followed from this audience, well represented by breast cancer survivors, most notably concerning survival among women diagnosed with breast cancer while pregnant, and those who got pregnant after treatment for breast cancer. I reported that, contrary to commonly given medical advice, survival was markedly better in both cases among women who chose childbirth instead of abortion. Ironically, the best research in the world on these subgroups of women was performed at the Princess Margaret Hospital in Toronto, only 150 miles from where we sat in Kingston.

As the Globe and Mail article also reported, my world conference presentation "received applause from the audience, which included many pro-choice advocates." Thankfully, some organization concerned with women's health and women's rights has finally taken a good look at the ABC link. After all, abortion is the single most avoidable risk factor for breast cancer, and women everywhere have the right to know.

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