Another ‘for crying out loud’ abortion problem

Without judging intentions, I can’t say whether abortion supporters just don’t believe the evidence linking abortion with a higher incidence of breast cancer, or willfully ignore it. Either way, it’s one more health risk they do not want women to know before making their so-called “choice.”

Dennis Byrne had a good op-ed piece in yesterday’s Chicago Tribune that asked what I’ve been wondering…why are the media silent on this?

For example, a well-researched Chicago Tribune story last week disclosed that women who have just a couple of alcoholic drinks daily increase their breast cancer risk by 13 percent. Coincidentally, a new study reported that abortion is an important breast cancer risk factor, yet I couldn’t find a word describing the research in mainstream media.

How to explain this disparity? I’ll be vigorously advised that “most” studies disprove an abortion-breast cancer link. Or that the study in question appeared in a “conservative” scientific journal. Or that the study is bogus or unimportant. Or, more rudely, that the whole breast cancer argument has been concocted by anti-abortion rights advocates to make women afraid to have abortions.

Or several other smokescreen arguments designed to deflect attention and shut down the discussion.

So let’s look at the science of this latest study, which appeared in the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons. Using statistical techniques and reliable national health data, the study of eight European countries found, to a statistically significant degree, that the incidence of breast cancer increases with the incidence of earlier abortions. The researcher, Patrick Carroll, used the same mathematical model employed in a 1997 study that predicted with extraordinary accuracy breast cancer increases in England and Wales from 1998 to 2004.

Read his breakdown of Carroll’s research, and the arguments being used against it now. It’s very informative, especially this explanation:

In the study of the abortion-breast cancer link, the working hypothesis is simple: For a woman who has not had a child before, an induced abortion is more likely to cause cancer because it interrupts the hormonal development of breast cells for later lactation, thus leaving the cells more vulnerable to uncontrolled and abnormal division, i.e. cancer.

The problem with dismissing the Carroll study because it is epidemiological is that you’ll also have to dismiss a multitude of public health studies, including ones claiming a link between radon and lung cancer. These are the same epidemiological studies that alarmed millions of Americans, frightening them into buying radon detectors and creating a huge radon mitigation business.

This is how to engage the debate, following an argument through to its logical conclusion.

Science, by its nature, exists in an unsettled state. Evidence piles up on many sides. The public becomes unsettled. The media, as is their wont, avoid the complexities, especially when the complexities challenge preconceived or prevalent political notions. Instead of coming to grip with such concepts as epidemiology, they escape into silence. And ill-serve the public.

Especially when the issue is abortion.

Oh, and they’re also silent (as Byrne notes at the end of the piece) on media criticism.