An expert who has analyzed a newly released study denying a link between abortion and breast cancer says it is as valid as determining the incidence of heart disease by observing teenagers.
"The average age of diagnoses of breast cancer in America is 61 years old," concluded Andrew Schlafly, general counsel for the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons. "But the average age of participants in this study was only 42 years old, too young for the average person to develop breast cancer.
"This study is as meaningless as drawing conclusions about heart disease by looking at teenagers," he said.
The study, "Induced and Spontaneous Abortion and Incidence of Breast Cancer Among Young Women," by Karin Michels of Harvard Medical School and others, was published in the Archives of Internal Medicine. It found negligible connections between abortion and breast cancer.
Karen Malec, of the Coalition on Abortion/Breast Cancer, earlier told WND that breast cancer, like lung cancer, isn't something that develops overnight.
"If you smoke cigarettes, are you going to develop lung cancer tomorrow?" she asked WND, "Or six months from now?
Schlafly, who later analyzed the study, said the age discrepancies were not the only problems he found with the study that could have a major impact on the results and conclusions.
The study also "concealed' an important result to present the appearance that "abortion is safe," he found.
"The research data show that abortion causes a sharp increase in the deadly PR-negative breast cancer," Schlafly wrote. "The press reports concealed this alarming result, making it look like abortion is safe. The report's abstract concealed this important result also."
Thirdly, he said, "the research study deliberately excluded women who had had abortions and then died from breast cancer!"
Those who developed breast cancer early in the follow-up also were excluded, he said. "So those who were hurt most by their abortions were excluded, and this skewed the results towards a claim that abortion is safe," he said.
Researchers also made huge assumptions that would have left the results not reflective of the truth, he said. "The research study treated women who left the specific question about past induced abortions blank, perhaps due to embarrassment, as though they did not have an abortion," he said. "Many would draw the opposite conclusion.
"By switching women from 'had an abortion' to 'did not have an abortion,' this would inflate the numbers of breast cancers by women who ostensibly did not have an abortion. It would then falsely appear that abortion did not cause breast cancer," he said.
His analysis noted that more than one-fourth of the respondents to the questionnaire "exhibited confusion" about the wording of the survey, too, where it uses "spontaneous abortion" to refer to "miscarriage."
"Miscarriages do not increase breast cancer risk, and this deceptive word choice would cause many respondents to mark prior abortions as 'spontaneous abortion' or miscarriage. That would reduce any genuine differences between induced abortion and miscarriages in the observed results," he said.
Schlafly also suggested the research may be questioned because "none of the researchers hold positions in oncology, the specialty devoted to cancer, and one of the researchers is a nutritionist."
He also noted that the study concealed that 92 percent of the study group were "non-Hispanic white" subjects, and that African Americans, a population group reporting among the highest percentages of abortion, and Hispanics were virtually absent.
Malec's own analysis found that it appears the results of the study were obtained because that's what researchers wanted to find – an absence of an abortion-breast cancer link.
As WND has reported, many such studies indicating a lack of connection have been debunked for a lack of scientific integrity.
Dr. Joel Brind's results were published several years ago in the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons. Brind, Ph.D. and president of the Breast Cancer Prevention Institute, had updated a similar analysis he completed in 1996.
In his essay, Brind addressed 10 separate studies conducted between 1996 and 2005 – studies used by those who deny a link between induced abortion and cancer – pointing out problems with the each study's methodology. He asserts those problems skew the results toward the denial of a causal connection between abortion and breast cancer, also known as the ABC link, making them thoroughly unreliable.
The basic biology underlying the ABC link boils down to the fact that breast cancer is linked to reproductive hormones, particularly estrogen. At conception, a woman's estrogen levels increase hundreds of times above normal – 2,000 percent by the end of the first trimester. That hormone surge leads to the growth of "undifferentiated" cells in the breast as the body prepares to produce milk for the coming baby.
Undifferentiated cells are vulnerable to the effects of carcinogens, which can give rise to cancerous tumors later in life. In the final weeks of a full-term pregnancy, those cells are "terminally differentiated" through a still largely unknown process and are ready to produce milk. Differentiated cells are not as vulnerable to carcinogens.
However, should a pregnancy be terminated prior to cell differentiation, the woman is left with abnormally high numbers of undifferentiated cells, therefore increasing her risk of developing breast cancer.
Malec told WND "gatekeepers" in organized medicine have continued to maintain the appearance of an absence of links, and key leaders of the National Cancer Institute, which helped fund the newest study, previously have editorialized against studies confirming such a link.
The "personal ideology" or "their own involvement in performing or referring patients for abortions," have come between many researchers and the evidence that there is a link, according to the Coalition.
The new study also featured the contributions from Fei Xue, Graham A. Colditz and Walter C. Willett. Their work said induced abortion has been "inconsistently associated with breast cancer risk."
But it also included among its foundational work statistics from the Alan Guttmacher Institute, named for a past president of Planned Parenthood, the largest member of the abortion industry in the U.S.
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The inconvenient truth about 'safe abortion'