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NRL News
Abortion and Breast Cancer: The Missing Link in
Awareness Campaign You can tell it’s October. Up north, the leaves are turning to their festive fall reds and yellows. All over the country, pink ribbons are sprouting everywhere, from jacket lapels and bumper stickers to storefronts and billboards. As everybody knows, October is National Breast Cancer Awareness Month. It is good that everybody is indeed aware of breast cancer and the epidemic swath of destruction it has cut through American society. The not-so-good thing is that breast cancer awareness is often coupled with misinformation about the disease, its causes, its detection, its treatment, and its cure. In its October 1 edition, the Chicago Tribune reported on the results of a survey commissioned by the National Breast Cancer Coalition (NBCC). “There’s a lot of misinformation out there,” said NBCC president Fran Visco told the Tribune. “In order to take meaningful action, we need to educate, not just raise awareness.” Unfortunately, some of the very people who are publicly decrying the misinformation are busy themselves spreading it around. For example, according to the Tribune, the NBCC survey reported that “most women believe breast cancer can be prevented.” Tribune reporter Judy Peres insists, “In reality, there are only a few things women can do to reduce, but not eliminate, the risk of developing the disease, such as not drinking alcohol and not taking hormones. The biggest risk factors are being female and getting older.” One wonders just what “reality” Peres is talking about. Asian women, for example, have breast cancer rates four or five times lower than American women, even though they are still women and still getting older. And we know it’s not genetic because when they immigrate to the U.S., within a generation, the risks of women of Asian parentage are just as high as those in the U.S. for many generations. Clearly there are risk factors. But that doesn’t stop Christopher Wanjek, writing for Live Science’s Bad Medicine web site this month, from saying that the number 1 myth about breast cancer is that “Risk factors are mostly to blame.” Says Wanjek, “More than two-thirds of women with breast cancer have no known risk factors.” Let’s tackle this nonsense from two directions. First, no single factor so increases a woman’s breast cancer risk than the avoidable act of having an abortion. This elevates a woman’s overall risk of developing breast cancer by 30%. That doesn’t mean that most women who have an abortion will get breast cancer, or that most women who get breast cancer have had an abortion. It does mean that the effect of abortion is so strong that choosing abortion even once increases breast cancer risk. Of course, there is nothing more politically incorrect than a claim that abortion is unsafe (in any way). NRL News readers are well familiar with the informational battles waged in medical journals and the media over the abortion-breast cancer link (ABC link). The battle continues to rage. For example, Wanjek calls “Abortions cause breast cancer” his number 5 “myth.” To read his description is to get the distinct impression that it’s all a battle over statistical correlations among epidemiologists (the scientists who study such statistics). Trouble is, it isn’t just a battle of arcane statistics. In recent years, biologists have gotten a pretty good handle on where breast cancers start, and why. The basic biology demonstrates clearly why disrupting a normal pregnancy heightens breast cancer risk. When a woman gets pregnant, her estrogen and progesterone levels begin to rise within days of conception. The estrogen stimulates the production of more and more Type 1 lobules: more places for cancer to start. Estrogen levels continue to rise—up 2,000% by the end of the first trimester—stimulating growth day by day. But at about 32 weeks gestation, other hormones cause differentiation of the lobules to Type 3 and Type 4—lobules that can actually produce milk. The cells of these mature lobules are no longer able to multiply. Hence, even if affected by a carcinogen, they cannot grow into cancer. By 32 weeks gestation, 85% of the lobules have matured to Type 4. That means there are fewer places for cancer to start than there were even before the pregnancy began. That’s why abortion increases a woman’s overall risk of breast cancer by 30%. Pregnancy greatly increases the number of cancer-vulnerable lobules, a problem that is naturally cured in a full-term pregnancy. However, if her pregnancy is aborted, she is left with many more primitive, cancer-vulnerable breast cells than before she became pregnant. Second, about half the breast cancer in the U.S. is attributable to a woman delaying first childbirth until after age 25 or 30, or forever. That is because by the end of a 40-week pregnancy, 85% of a woman’s breast lobules have become mature, cancer-resistant lobules known as Type 4 lobules. The younger a woman is when she has her first child, the lower her lifetime risk. By contrast the breasts of a girl or woman who has never had a child consist 75% of Type 1 lobules and 25% of Type 2 lobules—lots of places for cancer to start. The longer the interval between puberty and first childbirth, the more the effects of carcinogens (some known, like cigarette smoke; some unknown) build up as abnormal, potential cancer-forming cells. This is not controversial. All experts agree that the longer a woman waits to have her first full-term pregnancy, the greater is her breast cancer risk. As my esteemed colleague, breast surgeon Angela Lanfranchi, is fond of saying to those who continue to deny the reality of the ABC link: “It’s the biology, stupid.” Joel Brind, Ph.D., is a professor of human biology at Baruch College, City University of New York; president of the Breast Cancer Prevention Institute in Poughkeepsie, New York; and a regular contributor to NRL News. |