The Much Disputed Abortion-Breast Cancer Controversy

I'm not going to bother to cite studies saying that abortion increases the risk of breast cancer, because there are probably an equal amount of studies saying that it doesn’t. There is a reason that I love logic: when all else fails, there’s nothing like some good old deductive reasoning.

Earlier this week a prominent surgeon, professor,  and president of the Breast Cancer Prevention Institute, Dr. Angela Lanfranchi, published a paper in the medical journal Linacre Quarterly about this link. I read her report, and decided to give a simplified version of it on here. She doesn’t cite any specific studies, but her logic is irrefutable.

It’s an undisputed fact that a woman who goes to term with a pregnancy reduces her risk of breast cancer. Before she’s pregnant, her breasts aren’t fully developed, and thus cancer vulnerable. When a woman becomes pregnant, the amounts of the hormones estrogen and progesterone increase radically, stimulating breast growth in the mother. The number of underdeveloped cancer-vulnerable breast cells multiply dramatically during the pregnancy, and it isn’t until the 32^nd week or so that the new breast cells actually mature and become cancer-resistant. About 85% of all the breast cells (both old and new) become cancer-resistant after the first full pregnancy. More and more cells become cancer-resistant with each subsequent full pregnancies, even further reducing the chances of developing breast cancer.

When a woman gets an abortion, however, she ends the pregnancy before her breast cells finish developing, and the body stops sending the hormones that would eventually “finish” the breasts. This leaves many more underdeveloped cancer-vulnerable breast cells than the woman would have had if she hadn’t gotten pregnant at all.

Abortion still increases the risk of breast cancer even after a mother has had a full pregnancy. The breasts change every pregnancy. Also, an abortion increases the risk of having a miscarriage and/or a premature birth, if the cervix or another part of the woman’s body is damaged. A natural miscarriage occurs because of insufficient amounts of progesterone and estrogen, and a woman’s breasts won’t develop with insufficient amounts anyway, while abortion-caused miscarriages can occur for other reasons. A premature birth, if it occurs before 32 weeks, increases the risk of breast cancer because the breast cells are not finished developing.

If you have the time (or even if you don’t), I urge you to read at least in part Dr. Lancranchi’s paper. It contains much more scientific, specific information than I put in here, and she explains it much more thoroughly. She also explains a link between breast cancer and some types of birth control.

A few side notes:

1. I hope you all had a wonderful Thanksgiving!

2. I decided to change my posting days to Tuesdays and Fridays, so that I can have a more equal amount of time to prepare each post.

3. I intend to be picking up pretty much where I left off: finishing my “ultimate pro-choice argument” rebuttal and a summary of our presidential candidates.

4. I now have an email address, grace.prolife@gmail.com, to which you can email me about anything related to this blog.

5. Thank you so much for your patience. I’m eager to get back to work!

Images found via Google Images. No copyright infringement intended.

The Deadly Dangers of Childbirth

Those are the dangers pro-abortioners like to point out. It isn’t uncommon for pro-abortion organizations to claim that abortion is many times safer (sometimes they claim up to twelve times safer) than childbirth. This has always sounded odd to me, since pregnancy and childbirth is flowing with what comes naturally to the female body, and induced abortion disrupts that flow. Unlike other surgeries, abortion gives absolutely no benefit to the body—it doesn’t improve your heart or help your knees or hips or any such thing. So the question is: what does abortion do to the body, what dangers does it pose, and is it really safer than childbirth?

The short answer is no. Common sense should tell us this. It isn’t safer than childbirth. And abortion isn’t an extraordinarily safe insignificant surgery. For one thing, it’s a blind surgery. The abortionist can’t see what he’s doing, unless he does an ultrasound-guided abortion, which doesn’t happen often because it takes five to ten minutes longer. (Longer abortions = fewer abortions = less money.)

As I said in another post, when death certificates are made out, the cause of death is rarely listed as abortion, unless the woman dies on the operating table, or perhaps in an emergency room immediately following the abortion—and not always then. Instead, the direct cause of death (infection, bleeding, etc.) is listed. Abortion is the indirect cause of death, and in most cases it is not mandatory to list abortion as an indirect cause of death (Here is an excellent article by Physicians for Life that gives more details on how abortion deaths vs. other maternal deaths statistics are warped.)

There have also been studies that research a randomly selected group of women who died within a year of their last pregnancy (whether it ended in birth, miscarriage, or induced abortion), compared to women dying with no recent pregnancy. The study I link to here includes not just physical-complication-deaths, but also suicides and motor vehicle accidents and such things, and then explains possible reasons for why (in this particular study, anyway) women who have had abortions always (except in natural death, where non-recent-pregnancy women were the highest) have the higher death rate.

It is also likely abortion causes (or helps cause) even more indirect causes of death. For example, I ran across this recent report the other day. It stated that the United States ranks 41^st in maternal deaths, with 1 death for every 4,800 births. First on the list was Ireland with 1 death for every 47,600 births. On a whim and a hunch, I looked up Ireland’s abortion laws. Turns out that abortion is illegal in Ireland, except when the life of the mother is in danger, and perhaps for severe physical complications; there is quite a bit of conflict in Ireland over its abortion laws, so I’m not positive how restrictive its laws currently are, but it is obviously more restrictive than, say…the US. I’m not saying that abortion is the sole cause of this, but the US isn’t exactly lacking in medical advances. There has to be other reasons: perhaps men and women in Ireland tend to live healthier lifestyles than we tend to live in the US. And/or perhaps abortion raises the risk of childbirth, which raises the childbirth death statistics, which in turn gives abortion advocates their “proof” that childbirth is more dangerous than abortion…even though abortion advances those risks in the first place.

In any case, abortion is more dangerous than the official statistics and abortion advocates say. How much more remains to be seen, but it can’t be ignored.

The Deadly Coat-hanger

The picture you see there is one of the symbols of the pro-abortion movement. Here is the basis of their claim:

1. Before abortion was legalized in 1973 in Roe v. Wade, thousands and thousands of women got unsafe, illegal abortions, approximately 200,000 to 1.2 million every year. (Thus the coat-hanger image. I’ll leave the rest to your imagination.)

2. Because abortion was so dangerous, 5,000-10,000 women died from abortions every year.

3. When abortion was legalized, there was no need to go to money-grubbing back-alley butchers for abortions: women could now go to licensed medical professionals under safe, sanitary conditions.

4. Thus, thousands of women’s lives were/are saved (because they didn’t die from unsafe abortions).

5. If abortion were made illegal, women would begin dying off like flies again.

6. Conclusion: abortion must remain legal.

In reality, there is little basis for this claim. First, the numbers*:

Women perhaps got 1.2 million illegal abortions every year? Really? Then why, the first year after abortion was made legal, were there only 744,600 abortions performed? Legal abortion doesn’t make women decide to be much more careful about getting pregnant. It makes the opposite occur. And this caused the deaths of 5,000-10,000 women? Actually, in 1972, the year before Roe v. Wade, there were only 39 deaths from illegal abortions. (They were higher in earlier decades, in the hundreds, but the numbers declined dramatically after antibiotics became widely used.)

It’s disturbing how widespread these false figures are. Planned Parenthood uses them. So does NARAL Pro-Choice America. Prominent pro-abortion organizations. And these figures are false. And it’s likely that a good deal of these people know they are false.

‘“In NARAL (the acronym for the then-National Association for the Reform of Abortion Laws) we generally emphasize the drama of the individual case, not the mass statistics, but when we spoke of the latter it was always 5,000 to 10,000 deaths each year'. I confess that I knew the figures were totally false...But in the `morality' of our revolution, it was a useful figure, widely accepted, so why go out of our way to correct it with honest statistics?" Said Dr. Bernard Nathanson, one of the founders of NARAL and once the director of the busiest abortion clinic in the Western world. (From Aborting

America, Doubleday, 1979.)’ [Quoted from here.]

Now that we have those fake figures out of the way, let’s do some math. This argument above shouldn’t affect pro-lifers at all. Did women die from unsafe abortions? Yes. (Women actually still die from abortions today.)It is terribly sad, but it isn’t the trump card. Pro-lifers care about life. For both the women and their children.

Assume that 10,000 women would die every year from unsafe abortions if abortion was made illegal again. Assume that the number of illegal abortions would be about the same as it was the first year abortion was legalized: 744,600.

Abortion Illegal: 10,000 + 744,600 = 754,600 deaths.

Abortion Legal: [unknown]** + 1,200,000 = >1,200,000 deaths.

I’ll take the former, please.

*Information gathered from several different websites, trusing that their sources were correct, as I can't look up everything first-hand myself.
**This number is uncertain because usually death causes aren't listed as abortion itself, but the specific thing that killed the woman: the type of infection (that was caused by abortion, though abortion isn't mentioned), for example. I am working on another post that discusses deaths related to abortion.

Here is a short list of websites I gathered information from, since I couldn't link to just one when I had a fact.
WEBSITES:
Georgia Right to Life
Why Can't We Love Them Both?
Physicians For Life
Abort 73

Prominent pro-abortion websites that use the fake figures (I don't like to link to them, but here are easy Google searches that will probably make them come up on top):
Our Bodies Ourselves: The Impact of Illegal Abortion
Lessons From Before Roe: Will Past be Prologue?
Before and After Roe National Organization for Women
Planned Parenthood Fact Sheet November 2009 Roe v. Wade Did Not Invent Abortion

Image found via Google Images. No copyright infringement intended.