Pro-aborts and their allies have attacked pro-life pregnancy centers for telling the truth about abortion and breast cancer (ABC). Since 2003, anti-lifers have been trying to silence such centers from disseminating the truth. They’ve even been successful in enacting gag laws, an egregious violation of the First Amendment, in order to keep their pro-infanticide agenda alive.
Well, there’s a new study saying that women who undergo abortions increase their risk of contracting breast cancer by 44%.
Joel Brind, Ph.D. wrote in Life News today that:
A new systematic review and meta-analysis of abortion and breast cancer (ABC link) in China was just published four days ago in the prestigious, peer-reviewed international cancer journal, Cancer Causes and Control.
In this meta-analysis (a study of studies, in which results from many studies are pooled), Dr. Yubei Huang et al. reported that, combining all 36 studies on the ABC link in China that have been published through 2012, the overall risk of developing breast cancer among women who had at least one induced abortion was significantly increased by 44%.
These results, said the authors, “were consistent with a previously published systematic review”. That review was the one I published in the British Medical Association’s epidemiology journal with colleagues from Penn State Medical Center in 1996, which study reported an overall significant 30% increased risk of breast cancer in worldwide studies.
[...]
But the new Chinese meta-analysis is a real game changer. Not only does it validate the earlier findings from 1996, but its findings are even stronger, for several reasons:
1. The link is a slightly stronger one, i.e., 44% v. 30% risk increase with abortion;
2. It shows what is called a “dose effect”, i.e., two abortions increase the risk more than one abortion (76% risk increase with two or more abortions), and three abortions increase the risk even more (89% risk increase with three or more abortions). Risk factors that show such a dose effect have more credibility in terms of actually causing the disease.
3. Huang et al. state: “The lack of a social stigma associated with induced abortion in China may limit the amount of underreporting”. Putative underreporting of abortions by healthy women has been routinely invoked to discredit the ABC link–the lack of credible evidence notwithstanding. This line of attack—variously called the “response bias” or “recall bias” or “reporting bias” argument, has now been neutralized.
4. Huang et al. explain why two earlier high-profile studies in Shanghai did not find the link, essentially by citing and extending arguments I had articulated in the British Journal of Cancer in 2004. In that published letter, I explained that the Shanghai population was unsuitable for studying the ABC link in the usual manner, because the prevalence of induced abortion was so high (greater than 50%) in the general population. Huang et al. provided strong evidence for that explanation, by performing what is called a meta-regression analysis of all the Chinese studies, which meta-regression showed that the more prevalent abortion was in the study population, the lower risk increase associated with abortion.
5. The Huang study follows right on the heels of two new studies this year from India and Bangladesh, studies which reported breast cancer risk increases of unprecedented magnitude: over 600% and over 2,000%, respectively, among women who had any induced abortions.
H/T Steven Ertelt