Iowa Komen Breast Cancer Foundation Gives Money to Planned Parenthood

Life News ^ | 06.08.06 | Steve Ertelt

[Coleus]

Quad Cities, IA (LifeNews.com) -- The local Susan G. Komen in the Quad Cities area of Iowa is coming under fire for giving proceeds from its annual race to the Planned Parenthood abortion business. Though Komen claims the money will not go to abortions, it is coming under fire for giving the money to a group that is probably responsible for raising the breast cancer risk.  Money from the 2004 Quad-Cities Race for the Cure was given to Planned Parenthood for Muscatine residents.In 2005 and 2006, Planned Parenthood, in an attempt to cover up its receiving funds from Komen, applied for funds from the breast cancer group by writing grant requests for Louisa County Health, which then passed the funds on to Planned Parenthood.   That upsets Mary Shepherd, a Davenport resident whose mother, a Rock Island native, died of breast cancer in 1977.

Shepherd planned to sign up for the Quad-Cities Race for the Cure in her memory -- especially since she is now the same age, 42, as her mother was when she passed away. Then, she discovered Komen's link to Planned Parenthood.  "Mom was very vocal about her beliefs," Shepherd explained. "She would call radio talk shows and write her Congressmen. She was critical of charities that abused money entrusted to them and would be appalled that the Susan G. Komen Foundation provides grants locally and nationally to Planned Parenthood."

"Planned Parenthood makes money by persuading people to kill their unborn children. It does not educate their victims on the lifelong physical and emotional repercussions of their decision," Shepherd added.  Shepherd also said she was appalled that Komen "tries to discredit studies that show a link between abortion and breast cancer."  Komen has come under fire in the past as Eve Sanchez Silver, a research analyst and Hispanic outreach director for Komen, quit her position in 2004 because the breast cancer group donates so much money to Planned Parenthood.  "The Foundation has done so much for so many women through its programs and research grants," Silver told LifeNews.com at the time. "But this revelation about Planned Parenthood and [Komen], indicates a well thought out funding strategy."

According to former Komen public relations director Kristin Kelly, Komen affiliates awarded 21 grants to their local Planned Parenthood chapters in 2003 totaling more than $475,000.  Sanchez Silver says women deserve to know the recent research showing a link exists and that women who have induced abortions are at greater risk for contracting breast cancer than women who carry the pregnancy to term.  "Black and Latina women have very aggressive breast cancers, often reported very late, often, unhappily, too late," Sanchez Silver told LifeNews.com. "If there are facts to be known they should be broadcasted, not swept under the rug."

Silver said the Planned Parenthood donations came at a time when local Komen affiliates were struggling to find enough funds to keep afloat. "Our [Komen] Advisory Councils were all aware of grassroots efforts in need of funding all across the country," Sanchez Silver told LifeNews.com.  Sanchez Silver is now the director of Cinta Latina Research, an organization that conducts research into breast cancer issues and their effects on minorities.

[Coleus]

Planned Parenthood can divert more of other funds for abortions. >>

and that's exactly what our morals-and-values Congress and White House does every year by appropriating millions to Title X every year besides by paying outright for abortions with Medicaid money.

[Neidermeyer]

Actually the breast cancer link is tentative at best and not proven in a blind study ... I doubt you could construct a good study of that however ...

What we do know for certain is that abortion leads to premature birth ,, ripping open a womans cervix in a few seconds with a leveraged tool rather than having it naturally open over the course of 24-48 hours does permanent damage... naturally this is undisclosed to PPOA clients... I don't have a link to the study but I believe it was in the netherlands and covered literally tens of thousands of pregnancies ,,, among women who never aborted there was no statistical difference in the preemie rate between now and the 1960's ... among the woman who had aborted previously the preemie rate was 40-50% higher than the baseline..

[nonliberal]

Though Komen claims the money will not go to abortions

If you put $50 in my right hand, doesn't my left hand benefit from that as well?

[adiaireton8]

It is the reason I didn't run in the Race For the Cure this year. -A8

[StJacques]

I have some statistics, though the ones I really want are not yet up on the web.

First of all; keep in mind that there are several statistical relationships you will want to track simultaneously to develop an answer to the quesiton you want. 1) The Incidence of Abortions after Rowe v. Wade over time -- or how many occurred in each year since 1973. 2) The Age Distribution of those women receiving abortions over time -- or what is the distribution by age group of those women having abortions. 3) The Incidence of Breast Cancer over time -- or how have breast cancer diagnoses been tracked before and after Roe v. Wade. 4) The Age Distribution of the Incidence of Breast Cancer over time -- or at what age were women diagnosed with breast cancer.

I could also introduce some other trends you might want to track, but these are the minimal group and I'll tell you why. First of all; keep in mind that the relationship between a woman having an abortion and later contracting breast cancer will not be one that shows up immediately. You would likely expect that it would take a number of years for cancer to surface after an abortion IF the fact of the abortion is a cause. I'm just hypothesizing here, but it would seem to me that a woman who had an abortion in her 20's might not expect to be diagnosed with cancer until her 30's. So the proper method of tracking the influence of abortion on breast cancer rates will be to identify how many women within a given age group have abortions in any given year and then track that age group over time to see if their is a heightened statistical probability of breast cancer in years to come, ideally ruling out other possible causes to isolate the correlation between abortion and breast cancer.

Also keep in mind that abortion rates have not remained constant in the U.S. since Roe v. Wade. I'm not certain of this right now, but I seem to remember that there was a decline in the abortion rate in the late 1980's and into the 1990's. Am I right about that? Maybe you can tell me. At any rate, the likelihood of fluctuations -- whether up or down -- in the rates for both the incidence of abortion and the incidence of breast cancer would be important to tracking a relationship between the two.

And ideally, you would want to "regress" the incidence of breast cancer "against" the incidence of abortion for some time period prior to the diagnosis of cancer (to permit a causative relationship to take place) and then draw a partial correlation that strengthens the relationship between the two by factoring out other possible causes such as family risk factors, incidence of estrogen therapy (a known cause for breast cancer, my mom was in this group), and other known causes. Got that? LOL! Forgive me, but I have been trained as a Research Analyst, so crunching numbers, especially demographic statistics, is well known to me, even though I work as a software developer now.

With all of that in mind, what have I found for you? Well, it's not much, but here it is.

The best statistics that are from the Surveillance Epedemiology and End Results (SEER) branch of the National Cancer Institute. At the following link:

http://seer.cancer.gov/statfacts/html/breast.html?statfacts_page=breast.html&x=15&y=17

You will find the "joinpoint trend in SEER cancer incidence and mortality" for breast cancer from 1975-2003. What that means is you get to track the "Annual Percentage Change" in incidence and mortality for breast cancer from 1975-2003 (does it go up or down?). And here is that data:

Incidence and Mortality for Breast Cancer Among Women, All Races: 1975-2003
Figures Show "Annual Percentage Change" over Previous Years

Statistic	1975-1980	1980-1987	1987-2001	2001-2003
Incidence	-0.4	+3.7	+0.4	-4.8
Mortality	+0.4	-1.8	-3.1	-1.4

I would draw your attention immediately to the two cell entries for "Incidence" (row 1) for 1980-1987 and 1987-2001, both of which show a consistent trend upwards in the incidence of breast cancer after Roe v. Wade in general, but that is only of limited utility. What we do NOT have here is data which shows the distribution across specific age groups. I found a couple of statistical analyses listed in the SEER database that were not filled out in the .pdf files when I opened them, which I believe would have given me that information. But I do have a broad overview of one statistic I want to show you that lends at least a little more support to the notion that increased incidences of abortion may lead to increased incidences of breast cancer later in life. You might also notice that while the incidence of breast cancer is increasing in those years, the mortality from the disease is dropping. If younger women were being diagnosed in greater numbers during those years this is what you would likely expect, given that they should have more robust physiques. Again, this does not prove the point, because more age-specific data is needed, but it does not weaken the hypothesis either.

In the page at the following link:

http://seer.cancer.gov/csr/1975_2003/results_single/sect_04_table.01.pdf

Incidence of Breast Cancer Among Women, Below 50 and Over 50: 1975-2003
Figures Show "Annual Percentage Change" over Previous Years

Age Group	1975-1980	1980-1986	1986-2003
Under 50	-1.4	+3.0	-0.3
Over 50	+0.8	+5.8	+0.7

Note "Under 50" for "1980-1986" and "1986-2003." That is a large increase for the first cell entry and only a very modest decrease for the second. These contain the women who would have had abortions in the previous ten years or so and, when you factor in overall increases in medical science, it might just help to explain the figures. The only "contrary" piece of data in all of this is the "Over 50" cell entry for "1980-1986," which shows a large annual percentage increase in the same period that you see it among younger women, which suggests there may have been more going on than just abortion in the previous 15 - 20 years. But again, without good age-specific data it is hard to tell.

So Coleus, to sum it all up, a brief review of what statistical evidence there is as returned from an initial web search does nothing to refute the hypothesis that abortion may lead to an increased risk factor for breast cancer later in life, though an absence of more age-specific data limits our ability to discern much more than the most abstract possibilities as of now.

And I must repeat that I am looking at the statistics without having recourse to incidence of abortions, which is necessary for the comparisons to make sense.

So; even though it took me over an hour to prepare this post, I noted a genuine desire to protect the unborn in your posted sentiments Coleus, a sentiment I applaud, so I didn't mind one bit. It was time well spent.

[StJacques]

Pinging you both on my previous post, #25.

[D1X1E]

This is as sick as seeing the mom of young aids victim Ryan White,(anyone remember this?) embracing Elton John and thanking him. I remember thinking at the time, thanking him for what? Being one of the persuasion who brought us aids in the first place? Since there does seem to be some credible link between abortion and breast cancer this struck me in much the same way.

[Coleus]

StJacques, thank you so much for taking the time to look up and explain these statistics. They were very helpful. Yes, thankfully abortion rates are on the decline. The reason why I asked for the stats is that I once attended a conference where a pro-life physician spoke and pointed out the before r v. w, there weren't too many woman in their 20's getting breast cancer and now after r v. w she is seeing a high amount of women getting breast cancer which is usually a disease which older women get and when she does her interview (she's a breast reconstruction surgeon) one of the common points she found out was that, in the women with NO family history of BC, abortion was the only common factor in these young women with breast cancer. Most of these girls had one or more abortions in either high school or college.

[StJacques]

Coleus; First of all; you're welcome and I appreciate the anecdote you related about the breast reconstruction surgeon mentioning the relationship she observed in her own work regarding women with breast cancer who had no family history of the disease who also had abortions later in life. That is a first-hand (primary source) observation of a health-care provider that should carry some weight; at least with everyone besides NOW, NARAL, and Planned Parenthood.

If you would permit me, I would like to make a few more comments about how statistical research can be used to advance our understanding of a possible relationship between abortion and breast cancer.

Since all scientific reasoning is essentially "inferences drawn from repeated observations of phenomena," it is worth noting that there are levels of accuracy in these observations. If a truly reliable study to trace the relationship between abortion and breast cancer were to be conducted it would involve only a modest use of statistical reasoning. I think it would look something like taking one group of women who had abortions in their 20's and tracing their medical history over time, taking a second group of women who did not have abortions and tracing their history over time, and taking a third group whose history of either having or not having abortions was unknown and tracing their history to see if the relationships developed in observing the first two groups held true for the third (the control group). This kind of research involves direct observation of primary sources (the women in the study) and it is always the most reliable because the researchers actually collect the data first-hand, which limits the possibility of errors in what is recorded.

Reasoning by "statistical inference" is not as reliable as the direct observation method described in the preceding paragraph, but on occasion it can be every bit as accurate; especially when the data used is of a high quality. When one attempts to use statistics to explain a relationship there are usually two primary goals in mind; to explain the form and the strength of that relationship as revealed in the data. By the form of the relationship I refer to what we would describe as the "slope of the line" as it would be plotted on a graph with x and y axes. Since you would want to explain incidences of breast cancer (the y value) in terms of the incidences of abortions (the x value) you would expect, if the relationship is "valid" or "meaningful," that in a given population the percentage or number of incidences of breast cancer will rise as the percentage or number of incidences of abortions rise. In other words, you would expect the line to rise from left to right and the closer that slope is to a perfect 45º angle, the more meaningful the relationship becomes. And if the line rises in such a fashion, then you can go on to test its strength by trying to remove those data points from the set of observable data that may contain incidences of other factors known to raise the risk of breast cancer such as family history of the disease, estrogen therapy, contraceptive use, etc. to see if the data points gather more closely to the line you plot on the graph that "averages" (calculates the mean of) their placement. If you can prove that removing other known risk factors from the data causes these data points to gather more closely together (this is revealed by a statistic known as the R² value) then you have further reinforced the "validity" or "meaningfulness" of the relationship.

So Coleus; to sum it all up, I believe there is enough data already collected by medical statisticians whose content can be analyzed so as to permit reliable statistical inference as to whether the incidence of abortion increases the likelihood of the incidence of breast cancer in women later in life. That statistical inference cannot, and will not, prove that abortion can be a "causative factor" of breast cancer, but it can establish, if the relationships I described in my preceding paragraph are borne out in the analysis, that an abortion earlier in life may be considered a legitimate risk factor for breast cancer later in life, since "risk factors" describe "probabilities" and the probability, at least theoretically, could be clearly shown.

I hope I did not bore you with all of this technical speak, but I noticed that some seem to doubt that the correlation between abortion and breast cancer can be logically demonstrated and, provided that data can be collected along the lines of what I described in my post #25 above, I believe that it can.

[iowamark]

Thank you for this thread. This is something which needs much wider publicity.

[Conservativegreatgrandma]

I no longer give any money to cancer research. This only reinforces my justification. We've been fighting this "war on cancer" for years without almost any progress.

Oh, they claim they are making progress but earlier detection only makes their treatments look more effective. Most patients probably do not live any longer than if they had never had treatment and they would have had a much better quality of life.

My grandmother never treated her breast cancer and lived for at least seven years after she noticed a lump. By the time a lump appears, the cancer could already have been there for a very long time.

In all fairness, I have had relatives who treated their cancer who seem to be doing quite well.