Another Benefit of Motherhood

 

A fascinating study coming out of a group at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle is both provocative and potentially misleading. The article, "Fetal Microchimerism in Women With Breast Cancer," appeared in the October 1 issue of Cancer Research, a publication of the American Association for Cancer Research.

 

Authors Dr. Vijayakrishna K. Gadi, MD, and J. Lee Nelson, M.D, concluded that "Fetal Cells that persist in a woman's body long after pregnancy--a common occurrence known in scientific circles as fetal microchimerism--in some cases may reduce the woman's risk of breast cancer."

 

"Our research found that these persisting fetal cells may be giving a woman an edge against developing breast cancer," Dr. Gadi added.

 

Put another way, the cells that have entered a mother's blood during pregnancy live on, "setting the mother's immune system on alert for abnormal cells and perhaps helping her to destroy cancer cells in the future," as the Boston Globe described it.

 

According to published accounts, what's particularly interesting for us is that one of the two observations that provided a  "rationale" for exploring the possibility the lingering fetal cells may stave off breast cancer is that "It is well established that women who have given birth have a lower risk of breast cancer." But why this is so--and its implications for the abortion-breast cancer link--are not explored in the Gadi/Nelson study. Before looking at what they found, we will.

As Dr. Joel Brind has patiently explained many times in National Right to Life News, almost all breast cancers originate in cancer-vulnerable Type 1 and 2 lobules. In a normal pregnancy, estrogen causes these lobules to multiply, leaving more places for breast cancer to develop.

But in the last months of pregnancy, pheromones produced by the baby mature the mother's breast lobules into Type 4 lobules, which are cancer-resistant.

Thus, in addition to taking the child's life, an abortion presents a double whammy to her mother. Abortion both multiples risk and eliminates protection.

Having an abortion increases her risk since the number of cancer-vulnerable lobules (Types 1 and 2)--which multiple during a normal pregnancy--have not been allowed to mature into cancer-resistant lobules (Type 4). But the woman who aborts also loses the breast cancer protection that goes with completing a pregnancy; the younger, cancer-vulnerable breast lobules have not been given the opportunity to mature, a process which takes later in the pregnancy.

Returning to the Cancer Research study, Gadi and Nelson examined the blood of 82 women. Thirty-five of these women had breast cancer, 47 had not.

Approximately two-thirds of the women studied have had children. The researchers searched the women for male DNA, "which was easier to isolate than DNA from a female child."

Fetal microchimerism (cells from a previous baby) was found in the blood of  43% of the healthy women versus 14% of the women with a history of breast cancer.

The irony is that fetal microchimerism has been implicated as a mechanism of autoimmune disease.

The study was financed by the National Institutes of Health.

The full study can be read at  http://www.aacr.org/Uploads/DocumentRepository/2007journalpdfsnews/canres_gadi_oct_2_final.pdf.

Please send your comments and observations to Daveandrusko@hotmail.com.