Posted on 10/27/2009 4:13:18 PM PDT by thisisthetime
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Observing my own acquaintances (and thinking of my own experience), it is not uncommon for educated and otherwise-aware women to procrastinate on procreation and then be hit by the sad reality of subfertility.
Considering that there are studies that go back to 1981 that confirm this;
Dr. M. C. Pike, at the University of Southern California in l981, published the first serious scientific study that demonstrated a direct association of induced abortion with later breast cancer. He studied 163 women who developed breast cancer before age 33, and compared them with 272 controls. He showed that if a woman had aborted her first pregnancy, her chance for developing breast cancer was increased by a factor of 2.4 times. Pike MC, Henderson BE, Casagrande JT, Rosario I, Gray CE (1981) Brit. J. Cancer, 43:726.),
it shouldn't be a surprise at this point.
Interesting refernces at this link.
It’s pretty obivious if you look at the charts of instances of breast cancers. They were much lower prior to about a decade after the birth control pills became widely used and they also jump again about a decade after abortion became legal.
It says she waited until she was 40. For any medical school graduate, it would be a sign of unusual ignorance not to be well aware that most women’s fertility has substantially declined by that age, and that not a few are completely infertile by that age. For a surgeon who has specialized in breast surgery, in other words whose practice consists largely of women of middle to late child-bearing age for whom the possible effects of chemotherapy on future fertility prospects would be a common concern (with the question of how likely it was that they even still had any fertility to warrant trying to protect, being an important factor in patient counseling, with life-and-death implications), it’s not even remotely plausible, unless she was so clueless and incompetent that she should have had her medical license yanked decades ago.
She’s not a random “educated and otherwise-aware woman”. She’s someone whose profession of three decades has required her to counsel patients as they make difficult decisions about treatment options, including the decision as to whether to pursue or forego chemotherapy as part of a treatment program, while weighing the likelihood that it would make a difference in whether the cancer recurred or spread, against the likelihood that it would bring fertility to an end. If she wasn’t knowledgeable enough about the normal fertility curve to counsel women who were 39 or 40 that foregoing chemotherapy to protect fertility likely amounted to risking cancer recurrence in an effort to keep something they’d already lost anyway, she had no business practicing in this area of medicine.
Look at the chart of average weight of American women over the same period. It’s been climbing steadily, and additional body fat (even short of being medically classified as “overweight”) is well-known to increase estrogen levels and thus increase the incidence of breast cancer. There was an article just a day or two ago about the increasing incidence of breast cancer in young girls, even as young as 10. Increasing body fat (and the closely associated early onset of menstruation) is suspected as one of the factors in this alarming new trend. In addition, the rates of breast cancer in men have been significantly increasing for the past 25-30 years, and we can safely assume that this isn’t due to oral contraceptive use or abortion.
She "hadn't realized"? --- as you yourself pointed out, the possibility of that being something other than a rhetorical hyperbole is vanishingly remote. I think it's possible you're taking one throw-away line which gives far from a complete picture, and using it as an excuse for expansive derogatory speculation.
Why are you so insistant that it has nothing to do with it? Are you aware that other countries have been studing the link for amny years but the studies have never been given credit in this country due to the pharma corps? A friend’s father was a foreign born doctor and up until his death last year I had access to many of the journals he recieved and yes there is a direct link.He knew I was interested and would translate them for me.It’s just too bad women in this country aren’t told the truth.
The quote from the article is “I could kick myself in the butt for waiting until I was 40 to have children.” Sure sounds to me like she *waited* until she was 40 — not clear if she ever actually had any. Either she actually “didn’t realize” or she really just didn’t care because her career was more important to her (a much more plausible assumption). Oddly, there is no mention as to whether she’s ever been diagnosed with breast cancer, whether she ever took oral contraceptives, or whether her “waiting” involved any abortions.
The whole notion that childbearing is something women should pursue early and often as a way to avoid breast cancer is insane and offensive. The increase in breast cancer rates from delayed or omitted childbearing is clear but small, and most women who choose to delay or omit childbearing are doing so because they’ve decided that they have some other priorities (in many cases, as traditional as wanting to make sure they’ve found a man who’s really good husband and father material, and that they want to spend their lives with and raise their children with).
There is NO scientific evidence that having abortions increases breast cancer rates, despite exhaustive research on the matter, including a solid study from Baylor University medical school, which is hardly known for harboring an abortion-promoting agenda. Anyone who is still running around promoting this notion is rightly regarded as an ideologically-driven quack. If somebody, someday actually produces some real scientific research showing such a link, even in some small subset of women with other key co-factors required, it will be worth discussing, but that hasn’t happened. Angela Lafranchi has in fact never published any medical research, ever, on any topic. Not even as a second or fifth or tenth author, much less as a lead author. The only publications that show up for her in PubMed are 3 opinion pieces in an obscure, ideologically-driven legal journal, and an opinion-based comment (i.e. letter to the editor) in Lancet Oncology. In other words, she’s not a medical/scientific researcher at all, yet she’s running around claiming that all the real researchers in this field are part of a conspiracy: “federal agencies and academicians are participating in the suppression of information about the heightened risk of breast cancer” (from the abstract of her most recently published diatribe in the legal journal).
There is ample evidence linking hormonal contraceptives and also abortion to breast cancer for those who study the issue closely. Start with the fact that the incidence of breast cancer has increased by 40% since 1975. What would cause this? This is what started the good doctor down the path to scientific truth.
In the following textbook, Bland KI, Copeland EM. The Breast: Comprehensive management of malignant diseases, 3rd ed, 2004. Epidemiology of Breast Cancer, the text states that the increased risk from induced abortion after 12 weeks of pregnancy is 38%. There are a vast number of studies as well, the majority of which link breast cancer and abortion. Specifically, this is an abortion prior to the first full term pregnancy.
Estrogen in hormonal birth control has been considered a carcinogen by the WHO since studying the issue in 2002, and the NIH lists estrogen as a carcinogen. The estrogen stimulates breast tissue growth, which increases the number of potentially cancerous cells. The increased risk here is also approximately 30% or greater.
http://www.cancer.org/docroot/PED/content/PED_1_3x_Known_and_Probable_Carcinogens.asp
http://monographs.iarc.fr/ENG/Classification/crthgr01.php
The American Association of Pro-life Obstetricians and Gynecologists (AAPLOG) has a couple good articles debunking those that say there is no link between abortion and breast cancer: http://www.aaplog.org/downloads/AbortionComplications/Induced%20Abortion%20and%20Subsequent%20Breast%20Cancer%20Risk.pdf
Dr Lanfranchi is not alone - the data is on her side, and I commend her for speaking the truth.
I'm with you on that.
"The whole notion that childbearing is something women should pursue early and often as a way to avoid breast cancer is insane and offensive."
Show me where anybody has actually advocated that. For you to adduce this and then triumphantly repudiate it is a strawman argument. But I'm away (mostly) for a coupla days. Have a nice weekend, GS.
I have a sister who gets an injection once a year which completely stops her menstruation. She has not had a period in over 5 years. Previously she was on birth control pills.
She is also in her mid forties and has never had a child.
There has been no incidence of breast cancer in my family. But, I worry that she will suffer from it for the reasons mentioned above. Time will tell. I hope I worry for nothing.
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