A Link Between Abortion and Breast Cancer?
http://discovermagazine.com/2003/feb/feathated/article
Endocrinologist, Joel Brind, stumbled across an article in 1992 arguing that teenage girls who get pregnant seem to have a built-in protection against breast cancer. Brind asked himself, "What happens if the teen terminates her pregnancy?" Brind began to study and became convinced that abortion was a significant risk factor for breast cancer. He found that after only a few days of pregnancy, the corpus lutem secretes hormones which cause the breasts to increase in size. After a termination the woman is left with cells that are more likely to be sensitive to carcinogenic stimuli which increases a woman's chance of developing breast cancer by 30%.
Brind teamed up with other endocrinologists and a biostatician with different views on abortion but a desire to reduce the risk of breast cancer. They found that in a study with female rats, the rats who have had abortions more easily developed cancer. Brind also questions both healthy women and women with breast cancer about their pregnancy decisions and found that breast cancer was more common in women who had abortions.
Brind has found it very difficult to spread the results of his findings due to the number of organizations who are trying to keep these studies silent. Despite the efforts of the National Cancer Institute, the American Cancer Society and the World Health Organization Brind thas fought hard to spread awareness. Many states have considered passing laws which require abortions clinics to inform the women of the link and two states have already passed the law.
Many believe Brind to be a bias scientist who is manipulating statistics to support his own view on abortion. Those who oppose Brind believe that many of the women who are questioned about their pregnancy history are lying due to shame. They also argue that the link between abortion and breast cancer cannot be proven due to too many variables. The argument continues on as Brind and other medical scientists search for facts that prove or disprove the link between abortion and cancer.
Response: The article tends to oppose Brind and his findings but I believe the link to be logical and seemingly factual. I think it's interesting that his "team members" (the other scientists who are trying to prove the link factual) are pro-choice but still see abortion to be a risk. It makes perfect sense that if you stop a natural process, which God especially created for a specific purpose, there will be repercussions. I find myself wanting to believe Brind to be correct not so that women who have abortions will develop cancer (that's not what i want) but to prove that God creates life and when you mess with it, everything is out of sorts.
posted by emma @ 3:36 PM
3 Comments:
I thought this article was interesting because this is just one more thing that goes wrong when you have an abortion. Not only are you messing with God's plan, you can have so much phsical damage you can never have children, you can have really severe emotional scars and now you can get cancer!
I found the idea, let alone the article itself, to be fascinating. I find it not only ironic, but also trgic that women who intentionally destroy their unborn children in turn suffer from cancer. I would like to think that with research and evidence like this, fewer women would be inclined to have abortions. Also, it seems extremely interesting to me that other scientists want this research to stay silent. Its as if they KNOW abortions are wrong and damaging, but they do nothing to prevent women from having them. I would like to know about the research and the facts behind the article, but overall I found the article informative and interesting.
This article makes perfect sense to me. If you stop a natural process(if you believe in God or not)there will be repercussions. The most startling thing about the article was that other people are trying to silence scientific studies to push their pro-life own agenda. No matter what you believe about the moral side of abortion, true research should never be simply ignored.
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