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Abortion, birth control pill linked to breast cancer, surgeon says
The Woodward Report ^ | October 26, 2009 | Meredith Moss

Posted on 10/27/2009 4:13:18 PM PDT by thisisthetime

DAYTON — After her best childhood friend died from breast cancer, Ruth Deddens began researching the causes of the dreaded disease.

The Oakwood woman’s investigation eventually led her to Angela Lanfranchi, a clinical assistant professor of surgery at the Robert Wood Johnson Medical School in New Jersey and president of the Breast Cancer Prevention Institute. Deddens, active in the “40 Days for Life” movement, decided to bring Lanfranchi to town as part of this year’s local pro-life campaign.

Lanfranchi — who insists there are proven links between breast cancer, abortion and birth control pills — was the featured speaker at St. Anthony Church in East Dayton and a Sunday afternoon, Oct. 25, public gathering at the University of Dayton. She also spoke at two invitation-only events hosted by Deddens in memory of her friend, Katherine “Kit” Benham England, who died last Easter.

Lanfranchi labeled hormonal contraceptives “a Group 1 carcinogen” and said that “breasts are different after an induced abortion because they’ve grown and there are more places for the cancer to start.” She said the same thing happens in premature delivery. In contrast, she said, a full-term pregnancy offers protection against the disease because the mother’s mammary glands have fully matured into cells capable of producing milk and most resistant to carcinogens.

“I could kick myself in the butt for waiting until I was 40 to have children,” said the surgeon, who said she was focused on her career and hadn’t realized her fertility rates would drop as she got older. Having children in the early twenties or as a teenager, she said, would also have decreased her breast cancer risk.

(Excerpt) Read more at thewoodwardreport.com ...


TOPICS: Culture/Society; News/Current Events
KEYWORDS: abclink; abortion; angelalanfranchi; birthcontrol; breastcancer; cancer; lanfranchi; nj
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1 posted on 10/27/2009 4:13:20 PM PDT by thisisthetime
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To: thisisthetime

bttt


2 posted on 10/27/2009 4:16:13 PM PDT by Mrs. Don-o ("It is our choices, far more than our abilities, that show us what we truly are. " -- J.K.Rowling)
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To: thisisthetime

Ahh.. The sixties revolution.


3 posted on 10/27/2009 4:26:43 PM PDT by tired1 (When the Devil eats you there's only one way out.)
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To: thisisthetime

I am grateful to have escaped the scourge of The Pill and abortion. I am sorry to say I’d have probably aborted if in a bad situation before I became a Christian.

El Hubbo and I have had our disagreements, but he never wanted me on the pill and we had our kids when I was in my 20s and 30s. So thank God, and thank El Hubbo. He looked out for me when I was young and stupider.


4 posted on 10/27/2009 4:45:27 PM PDT by Marie2 (The second mouse gets the cheese.)
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To: thisisthetime
For more details from Lanfranchi, see http://www.prolifetechnology.org/proceedings/2005/slides/2005-s-lanfranchi.pdf
5 posted on 10/27/2009 5:12:15 PM PDT by JoeFromSidney
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To: thisisthetime
“I could kick myself in the butt for waiting until I was 40 to have children,” said the surgeon, who said she was focused on her career and hadn’t realized her fertility rates would drop as she got older.

She graduated from medical school without knowing that women's fertility rates drop as they get older?

I call BS. She's making up stories to suit her current agenda.

6 posted on 10/27/2009 7:06:43 PM PDT by GovernmentShrinker
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To: thisisthetime; informavoracious; larose; RJR_fan; Prospero; Conservative Vermont Vet; ...
+

Freep-mail me to get on or off my pro-life and Catholic List:

Add me / Remove me

Please ping me to note-worthy Pro-Life or Catholic threads, or other threads of interest.

Obama Says A Baby Is A Punishment

Obama: “If they make a mistake, I don’t want them punished with a baby.”

7 posted on 10/27/2009 7:10:10 PM PDT by narses ("These are the days when the Christian is expected to praise every creed except his own.")
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To: Marie2

Oral contraceptives actually reduce the risk of ovarian and endometrial cancers. Ovarian cancer is particularly deadly because is it usually diagnosed only after it’s quite advanced. The evidence for oral contraceptive use increasing breast cancer risk is still pretty weak — most of the statistical difference seen is probably attributable to delayed childbearing rather than oral contraceptive use (i.e. women who would have gotten cancer anyway, even if they’d been relying on condoms or diaphragms or IUDs).


8 posted on 10/27/2009 7:13:10 PM PDT by GovernmentShrinker
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To: narses

I attended this surgeon’s presentation and it was truly an eye-opener. I assure you that she is very knowledgeable and has done her research. Medical research is frequently politicized, just as it was with the tobacco - lung cancer link for so many years. The single most important thing that a woman can do to protect herself from breast cancer is to carry her baby to full term.


9 posted on 10/27/2009 7:28:05 PM PDT by Faith
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To: Faith

I agree.


10 posted on 10/27/2009 7:29:19 PM PDT by narses ("These are the days when the Christian is expected to praise every creed except his own.")
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To: GovernmentShrinker
This is from Lanfranchi's book, Breast Cancer Risks and Prevention (pg. 15):

It is now well established that birth control medications (contraceptive steroids) increase breast cancer risk, especially if they are taken before the first full-term pregnancy, when breast cells are still immature. Birth control pills are very commonly used by young women. In one study, women who took birth control pills before the age of 20 had a more than ten-fold increased risk of breast cancer. The longer the pill is used, the higher the risk. Contraceptive steroids increase risk whether they are given orally (i.e., "the pill"), by injection (e.g., Depo_provera), implantation, through the skin with a patch, intravaginally with a ring (e.g., Nuva Ring) or with an intrauterine device (IUD). Even "low dose" estrogen pills have been associated with higher breast cancer risk.

11 posted on 10/27/2009 7:36:04 PM PDT by Faith
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To: Faith

Lanfranchi is an agenda-driven quack. She does not teach at a medical school — “clinical assistant professor” is a title that every medical school bestows on hundreds or even thousands of practicing physicians, and just means that if students do a clinical rotation in their practice, it counts — doesn’t mean even a single student ever has.

What study? How many women who took the pill before they were 20? What other characteristics did they have? What about the dozens of large studies that show nothing of the sort? You can find “one study” showing almost anything, but random little studies with wild outlier results are meaningless. I’m sure some leftist quack could find you “one study” that showed Republicans have much lower IQs than Democrats. But when you dig a little, you’ll find the study subjects were something like a dozen poli sci majors at a notoriously left-wing college, so it would hardly be surprising that the handful of Republicans who chose to attend such a college to major in poli sci were on the dim side.

The fact is that there’s a reasonably strong correlation between not having babies at a young age, and higher breast cancer rates. This holds true even for women who never used any kind of contraceptives because they weren’t sexually active. If you’ve got no family history of breast cancer, and a family history of ovarian cancer, taking oral contraceptives reduces your risk of cancer.


12 posted on 10/27/2009 8:30:12 PM PDT by GovernmentShrinker
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To: GovernmentShrinker

Of course the Pill is just fine. It’s just common sense that a massive dose of synthetic estrogen to purposely screw up the reproductive system from doing what it naturally does has only positive side effects! /sarc

One thing makes me absolutely sick about the medical profession, and that is that too many people in it will strongly suggest ALL kinds of lifestyle modification (stop smoking, exercise, change diet) on medical grounds but treat fornication and contraception as if it were some sacrosanct third rail.

Yeah, ovarian cancer whatever. The Pill has always been, is now, and will always be a disgusting example of the medical profession putting the idiocies of the culture over the needs of the patient. Take that to the bank.


13 posted on 10/28/2009 3:36:52 AM PDT by Claud
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To: Claud

What the female reproductive system “naturally does” is to get pregnant almost immediately upon reaching puberty, and produce a baby approximately every 18 months, killing a huge percentage of mothers (and full term babies) in the process. What we take for granted in these modern times — women routinely having healthy babies with only a tiny risk of death for themselves — is attributable to the efforts of the medical profession. The natural death rate from childbirth is about 1 per 100 births, multiplied by the number of births per woman to get a lifetime risk of death from childbirth of over 5%. Currently in the US, the actual death rate is about 1 in 10,000 births, while in places like sub-Saharan Africa and Afghanistan, it remains at the natural rate due to the near-complete absence of medical care. “Natural” doesn’t automatically translate into “safe” or “good”.


14 posted on 10/28/2009 6:40:18 AM PDT by GovernmentShrinker
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To: GovernmentShrinker

In fact, the “female reproductive system” does not get pregnant almost immediately at puberty and then spit out a baby every 18 months. Unless of course, the female who owns the reproductive system in question is for some odd reason having coitus exactly from that moment on with virtually no let up. Part of the “naturalness” of the reproductive system is that it depends on coitus, which, barring the commission of a criminal act, is generally voluntary.

So we have a choice here. Tell people not to screw around and they won’t get pregnant—just like we tell them to eat less, not smoke, etc. Or tell them g’head, KEEP screwing around so then we can pump you full of synthetic estrogen and screw up your menstrual cycle.

I am not down on the medical profession for what it does well, and to be sure, it has saved a lot of lives and done lots of goods for mothers and babies. What I am saying is that its uncritical acceptance of the Pill is inherently contradictory and flies in the face of “first do no harm.”


15 posted on 10/28/2009 7:41:02 AM PDT by Claud
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To: Claud

Voluntary coitus from the onset of puberty through menopause is also natural.

There are a lot of good reasons to mess with the menstrual cycle, some of which are secondary to the typical modern lifestyle which typically features little physical activity and too much food. And the little physical activity part just isn’t going to change — the information age is here to stay, and most people need to spend large chunks of their time studying (from childhood through at least early adulthood) and processing information in connection with employment and personal affairs.

But it’s also not natural for women to have a period every month, because it’s natural for them to spend the vast majority of the time between puberty and menopause either pregnant or nursing. I’ve done a fair amount of genealogy research and can say with certainty that I’d had more periods before my 18th birthday than many of my female ancestors had in their entire lives (due to a combination of the much earlier onset of menstruation in modern times, and my ancestors’ non-stop childbearing beginning at marriage in their mid to late teens, which was also the typical age for onset of menstruation in those times). And plenty of research has shown that the hormone levels associated with natural menstruation are what correlate to higher incidence of breast cancer — more periods in one’s lifetime correlates very strongly with more breast cancer.

“Natural” is just not as compatible with civilization and long, healthy lives as many people would like to think.


16 posted on 10/28/2009 7:55:36 AM PDT by GovernmentShrinker
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To: GovernmentShrinker

Ok. You are arguing it is actually more natural to have less menstruation—as women did in previous ages. That might well be the case. However, you’re still prescribing an artificial means to get to a “natural” result...when a perfectly sensible natural means is there already as it was for our ancestors.

But why GS, why are doctors—and seemingly you yourself—so reluctant to advocate for a simple behavioral modification over a pharmaceutical solution in this case? It really doesn’t make any sense to me. Some will tell kids not to smoke, not to drink, not to have guns in the house for Pete’s sake, but then turn right around and say “well, you’ll have sex anyway, so here’s the Pill and some Gardasil.”

Far as I can tell, there’s NO medical reason for this attitude...just a very bad assumption inherited from the culture at large (and with Freudian roots I’m sure) that sex is some all-powerful force that cannot be resisted.


17 posted on 10/28/2009 8:20:13 AM PDT by Claud
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To: GovernmentShrinker

Oh, and one more thing to throw into the mix here. You’ve heard, I am sure, about the implicated effects that the synthetic estrogens from our sewers are having in feminizing fish populations?

The environmental movement itself seems to be awfully quiet about this finding...again, I believe, because it involves a certain kind of behavior modification that *they don’t like*.

This is not just doctors that are having this problem. It is the entire country at large. I’m afraid we have become sex-addled to the point where we are not seeing clearly anymore.


18 posted on 10/28/2009 8:25:30 AM PDT by Claud
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To: Claud

The reality is that returning to a culture where girls routinely marry very shortly after reaching puberty, and then proceed to have babies every 18 months, is not something that is viewed as desirable by more than a tiny percentage of the population. It’s totally incompatible with an information-based society which required that the vast majority of the population still be full-time students well past puberty, and devote most of their adult lives to things other than producing babies (including devoting a lot of time and energy to educating the small number of children they have). And having girls and women of menstruating age not having babies constantly, directly increases their risk of breast cancer — it makes no difference if they’re sleeping with a different guy every night and taking the pill, or if they’re celibate nuns not taking the pill.


19 posted on 10/28/2009 8:50:29 AM PDT by GovernmentShrinker
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To: GovernmentShrinker
What the female reproductive system “naturally does” is to get pregnant almost immediately upon reaching puberty, and produce a baby approximately every 18 months, killing a huge percentage of mothers (and full term babies) in the process.

Documentation, please. Part of the problem is the choices we make. Girls should not be engaging in sex "immediately upon reaching puberty." There are consequences to all behavior that does not line up with God's truths. God's design for the female body was and is perfect.

20 posted on 10/28/2009 10:51:33 AM PDT by Faith
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