In Indiana, there’s a bill on the table that would force doctors to tell pregnant women seeking abortions that fetuses can feel pain and having an abortion could increase their risk of breast cancer. It would also force ladies to view an ultrasounds of their fetus before going through with an abortion (unless they stated their refusal in writing). Indiana isn’t the first state to embrace the “theory” that abortion causes breast cancer—states like Alaska, Mississippi, Oklahoma, Texas and West Virginia already do it in state-sanctioned abortion counseling materials. Even though, again and again, physicians call bullshit on this “theory.”

Via Huffington Post:

In February 2003, the U.S. National Cancer Institute brought together “more than 100 of the world’s leading experts who study pregnancy and breast cancer risk.” They found that neither induced nor spontaneous abortions lead to an increase in breast cancer risk. In fact, the risk is actually increased for a short period after a woman carries a pregnancy to full term (i.e., gives birth to a child). According to ACS, these findings were considered “well established,” which is the highest level for scientific evidence.

In June 2009, the highly respected American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists Committee on Gynecologic Practice wrote, “Early studies of the relationship between prior induced abortion and breast cancer risk were methodologically flawed. More rigorous recent studies demonstrate no causal relationship between induced abortion and a subsequent increase in breast cancer risk.”

Meanwhile, another bill introduced in the Indiana legislature would immediately cut off funding for Planned Parenthood and other businesses that operate a “facility where abortions are performed”—even though the primary function for Planned Parenthood is to provide services like STD testing, birth control, breast exams, pap smears, and other preventative care for women.

Before I started writing the news, I always assumed the “war on women’s health” was hyperbole. But every day, lawmakers across the country are proving me wrong—they’re committed to ensuring that their theological values trump women’s health. It’s enraging and disgusting.

Former Stranger news writer Cienna Madrid has been a writer in residence for Richard Hugo House, a local literary nonprofit. There, she taught fiction classes and wrote 4/5 of a book about a death-row...

21 replies on “Furthering the Lie that Abortion Leads to Breast Cancer”

  1. Fraudulently claiming that abortion increases the risk for breast cancer WHILE AT THE SAME TIME cutting funding for breast cancer screenings – that’s the anti-choice stance on women’s health.

  3. On the other hand pressuring one’s daughter to forego HPV vaccination does in fact increase one’s daughter’s risk for cervical cancer, and this is a very very very very common, even universal, thing Christian parents do.

  4. As someone who doesn’t plan on having kids, I could swear I’d heard that breast cancer risks are higher for non-childbearers. And I suppose aborting a fetus is one way to stay a non-childbearer. Is that their screwed-up rationale?

  5. Any tax-exempt group (i.e., churches) that makes demands about where tax dollars should go should immediately lose their tax-exempt status.

    If you want to play, you have to pay.

  6. @1 – so spot on.

    And Cienna, this phrase in your second-to last sentence (“they’re committed to ensuring their theological values trump women’s health”) is so well-distilled, it should be used in pro-women’s health care and choice arguments. At least, I will use it in any discussions I have on this subject from now on. Because that’s the clear truth of this shit.

  8. 6

    wow

    that is JUST LIKE how Danny insists on his Depraved Hedonistic Homohumanist Theology of Promiscuity even though it kills tens of thoyusands of homosexuals every year!!

    feel free to use this phrase:
    “Danny is committed to ensuring his theological values trump homosexuals’ health”

  10. How sad is it that Americans keep electing these theological-value-trumps-women’s-health lawmakers. You’d never guess American woman have the right to vote, let alone serve as Senators and Congresspeople. I’d like to know if the 240 Congressional Representatives who voted to repeal Planned Parenthood live in cancer-free districts, and what legislation those districts have to keep them cancer-free.

    Or it could be that most American voters and lawmakers are myopic “oh cancer can never happen to me or to a woman I love” twits.

  11. @4,

    It wouldn’t surprise me if that’s the source of any supposed link, but there are many women who get abortions who already have children, and most childless women who have abortions eventually become mothers.

  12. The theory is that the abortion prematurely stops the breast cells from growing and then those cells have a higher of probability of turning into cancer cells. These studies have been debunked time and time again.

    It’s sad that this is still going on in 2011.

  13. I too would like to thank you for this phrase. (committed to ensuring their theological values trump women’s health) I wish I’d had it at my fingertips the other evening when I got into it on Facebook about Planned Parenthood with a young friend of mine.

  14. Trying to link breast cancer and abortion is bad science impelled by anti-woman ideology. This is true.

    That said, please, please don’t use the HuffPo as your source on health and science issues. Their reporting is fucking terrible. Their H&S reporting history is riddled with soft-headed woo bullshit from homeopathy to vaccine denial.

  16. Another thing that really gets to me about the persistent repetition of this myth is the impact that it has on women who have breast cancer – many of whom may also have had abortions.

    A diagnosis of cancer is devastating. With so little known about what causes so many cancers, there is often a search for answers to the question “Why me?” Women with breast cancer who have also had abortions hear these false statements linking the two and are overcome with guilt that their cancer is now “their fault”. Not to mention to impact on their loved ones.

    Deliberately and knowingly propagating this myth is evil.

  17. “tell pregnant women seeking abortions that fetuses can feel pain” I would like a law that force sellers to do the same whith meat.
    “You want some beef? Ok, but you must now thats cows feel pain. Wanna see a picture of the horse you just bought?

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