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How long will a biased media keep silent in the face of a
hazard that directly imperils more than 1 million women a year?

No, I'm not talking about the chemical industry, daily
poisoning the environment
with its toxins. Nor the producers of fatty food or
alcohol, also factors suspected of increasing breast cancer.

The industry I'm talking about is the abortion
business--consisting of abortion
"providers," their clinics, ideological supporters,
grant-giving foundations and the
rest of the political power structure that refuses to
even admit that a scientific
debate, let along scientific evidence, exists about the
dangers of induced abortions. They--despite their claims of superior
benevolence and compassion--are threatening thousands of women's lives
with an unspeakably painful disease.

Yet in the month of May, a time of renewal, promise, new
life and marches throughout the country against breast cancer, millions of
women are being deceived about this risk, or denied the knowledge of
important studies.

Twenty-seven out of 34 independent studies conducted
throughout the world (including 13 out of 14 conducted in the United States)
have linked abortion and breast cancer. Seventeen of these studies show a
statistically significant relationship. Five show more than a two-fold elevation of
risk. In turn, the abortion industry says all those studies are trumped by
one study, whose methodology, critics say, is seriously flawed.

The biological hypothesis is that during pregnancy, a woman's breasts begin
developing a hormone that causes cells--both normal and pre-cancerous--to
multiply dramatically. If the pregnancy is carried to term, those undifferentiated
cells are shaped into milk ducts and a naturally occurring process shuts off the
rapid cell multiplication. An induced abortion leaves a
women with more undifferentiated cells, and so, more cancer-vulnerable
cells.

When I first wrote about this issue in 1997, the scorn and name-calling flowed
in. Anti-choice fanatic. Ignorant bozo. Misogynist. Since then, much has
happened. The United Kingdom's Royal College of Obstetricians and
Gynecologists became the first medical organization to warn its abortion
practitioners that the abortion-breast cancer link "could not be disregarded." It
said that the methodology of the principal ABC (abortion-breast cancer)
researcher, Joel Brind, was sound.

John Kindley, an attorney, warned in a 1999 Wisconsin Law Review article
that physicians who do not inform their patients of the ABC link expose
themselves to medical malpractice suits. He concluded that about 1 out of 100
women who have had an induced abortion die from breast cancer attributable
to the abortion.

The American Cancer Society Web page lists induced abortions (along with
pesticides, chemical exposures, weight gain and other factors) among elements
that may be related to breast cancer, and that the relationship is being studied.

Earlier, Dr. Janet Darling and colleagues at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer 
Research Center, in a study commissioned by the National Cancer Institute,
found that "among women who had been pregnant at least once, the risk of
breast cancer in those who had . . . an induced abortion was 50 percent higher
than among other women." The risk of breast cancer for women under 18 or
over 29 who had induced abortions was more than twofold.

Women who abort and have a family history of breast cancer increase their
risk 80 percent. The increased risk of women under 18 with that family history
was incalculably high.

Being pro-choice didn't shield Darling from the usual attacks. She fought back.
"If politics gets involved in science," she then told the Los Angeles Daily News,
"it will really hold back the progress that we make. 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."

Yet the Web site of the Y-ME National Breast Cancer Organization, sponsor
of many marches, fails to mention even the possibility of the ABC connection in
its list of risk factors. Not even under its list of fuzzy, not "clear-cut" factors.

Not even the existence of a scientific debate over induced abortion is worth a
mention.

If you want to know more, look in on the Web page of the Palos Heights-based
Coalition on Abortion/Breast Cancer (www.AbortionBreastCancer.com). You
may not agree with everything there but at least you'll be respected for your
intellectual ability to make an informed choice.

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St. George Pro-Life | Parkview Christian Church