“The first casualty when war comes is truth.”
So said Senator Hiram Johnson a century ago, and remains true today in the war declared on Christian Civilization. The pivotal battle in this war is the issue of abortion, as abortion strikes at the very sanctity of human life, of motherhood, fatherhood, family, and the very essence of who we are, in Whose image we are made. So desperate are abortion’s proponents to present it as an absolute good, that clear and consistent data establishing a link between abortion and breast cancer have been actively denied by some of the very authors who discovered them, as they drafted a National Cancer Institute policy paper denying the existence of fifty years of data linking abortion and breast cancer.
The biology behind the issue is relatively straightforward. During puberty, girls produce 15-25 lobes in the breast, which will produce milk after the births of their babies. Each lobe may be thought of as a main branch of a tree. These lobes branch into several lobules. Under the influence of the menstrual hormones estrogen and progesterone, immature and cancer-susceptible Type-1 and Type-2 lobules form.
During normal pregnancy the ovaries secrete elevated levels of estrogen and progesterone, which cause the Type-1 and Type-2 lobules to increase in number. By mid-second trimester the breast size has doubled and rapidly matures under the influence of human placental lactogen. By 40 weeks of pregnancy, 85% of all lobule cells will be cancer-resistant Type-4 cells.
After a woman is finished nursing, many Type-4 cells will revert to Type-3 cells with evidence existing that genetic changes in these cells leave them cancer-resistant.
The mechanism by which abortion, oral contraceptives and combined hormone replacement therapy leaves women susceptible to breast cancer becomes evident since the biological basis for all three risks is the same. In terminating a pregnancy before a first full term pregnancy, the breasts have drastically increased Type-1 and Type-2 cells (leaving the breasts with more places for cancers to start), but have been denied the maturational and protective benefits of the last trimester. The birth control pill mimics this process on a monthly basis.
Miscarriage is an exception, as most women never produce significantly elevated levels of estrogen in these pregnancies.
Dozens of studies dating to the late 1950’s have established links between abortion and breast cancer, ranging from over doubled risks in teens to an incalculably high breast cancer risk for women who have abortions before age 18 as well as family history of the disease. Most of these studies are retrospective. That is, they take breast cancer patients and a group of healthy control subjects and ask questions about past gynecologic and reproductive history, including answering questions about prior abortions.
Incredibly, Dr. Louise Brinton of the Division of Cancer Epidemiology and Genetics, National Cancer Institute (NCI), chaired a panel in 2003 that dismissed the findings of these peer-reviewed studies (including her own), claiming the women involved were subject to “recall bias”, as though women who have had abortions are likely to forget.
Scientists have tested for recall bias on many occasions, in several different countries, but no scientists today claim to have found credible evidence of it. Nevertheless, Brinton’s workshop produced a “Fact Sheet” which summarily dismissed all credible data establishing a link between abortion and breast cancer.
The NCI workshop looked at only a few prospective studies, those relying on medical records before a patient developed breast cancer, and which were subsequently shown in medical journals to be methodologically flawed. The depth and breadth of the methodological flaws exceeds the limits of this article, but may be found at the Coalition on Abortion/Breast Cancer (ABC):
http://www.jpands.org/vol10no4/brind.pdf
and
http://www.abortionbreastcancer.com/Brind_NCBQ.PDF
ABC links to excellent articles by Joel Brind, Ph.D. of Baruch College, City University of New York, which critique the flaws in NCI’s workshop and in the prospective studies used.
Brinton was part of a research team led by respected cancer researchers Janet R. Daling and Jessica M. Dolle of the world-renowned Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, which published a paper last year: Risk Factors for Triple-Negative Breast Cancer in Women Under the Age of 45 Years, in the Journal Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers and Prevention.
This 2009 paper, under known and suspected risk factors, reports a statistically significant 40% increased risk of breast cancer. That’s an astounding admission from coauthor Brinton, in light of her NCI denial of such a link, as is this quote from the results section of the paper,
“In analyses of all 897 breast cancer cases, the multivariate-adjusted odds ratios for examined risk factors were consistent with the effects observed in previous studies on younger women. Specifically, older age, family history of breast cancer, earlier menarche age, induced abortion, and oral contraceptive use were associated with an increased risk for breast cancer.”
The “previous studies” which Brinton’s study mentions include studies conducted in 1994 and 1996 by this same team of researchers. Brinton served as co-author in the 1996 study. Although Brinton and the NCI had said that studies relying on women’s reports of abortion histories were flawed, Dolle’s team (which included Brinton) relied on women’s self-reports of abortion histories.
This 2009 paper was picked up by the pro-life blogosphere in January of this year and created a firestorm. A notation was subsequently added to the NCI Fact Sheet that states: “Reviewed 1/12/2010”. No change in policy or the webpage was made.
Thus, there is a compelling incongruity between the NCI and its branch chief’s denial of the link between abortion and breast cancer on the one hand, and what its branch chief’s research has reported before and since.
Women are dying, and continue to contract breast cancer at frightening rates. Yet abortion’s proponents have engaged in scientific misconduct at the highest levels: reporting the truth in journals, then publicly dismissing those data in a Procrustean attempt to accommodate a political agenda, leaving millions of women’s lives compromised as a result.
Coming Home 
I thought your earlier presentation at this site was very straightforward. The version at Headline Bistro may be a bit less effective, because it is wrapped in a point of view. Truth is the first casualty in war, period, not merely by one side or the other. When I read a debate between pro- and anti- I generally assume that both are slanting things to support their own argument. The beauty of the post at this site is it had none of that — just the facts ma’am. It should be available as standard information, without being part of an argument, and then it could be a reference point within an effort to persuade as well.
SJ,
I must tell you that I find your constant allegations of partisan sniping by me to be boorish, to say the least.
I’m a Doctor. I’ve trained long and hard to master the fundamental and advanced competencies in my field. I’ve actually read the scientific literature in this field extensively, which I presume you have not.
I have advanced a point of view that calls fellow scientists to task for publishing in the mid-90’s what they themselves claim to be statistically significant data obtained in what they and a panel of peer reviewers at A-list scientific journals have declared to be methodologically sound protocols, then turning around in a 2003 publication meant to drive public policy and declare their own data, their own methodology and the peer review process that approved them to be fundamentally flawed.
They weren’t intellectually honest enough to retract their papers. Why not, if the data and the methods are so flawed?
They declare the same for all data that do not fit their a priori political positions.
Meanwhile, women are dying and contracting breast cancer at alarming rates.
Then this same team used the very data set they declared invalid in 2003 to publish a 2009 paper that again found a statistically significant 40% increased risk of breast cancer in women who have had induced abortions, even going so far as to declare induced abortion as a “known risk factor” for breast cancer.
Known since when?
Then when they were called on this second about-face, they reviewed and let stand the 2003 NCI ‘fact sheet’ denying a link between induced abortion and breast cancer. Why, when a mere 9 months before they did this in January 2010, they declared induced abortion to be a “known risk factor”?
So do me a favor and save your smug assertions (explicit or implicit) about my lack of being able to read the scientific literature competently, and report on obvious multiple reversals by a given team of researchers. As a Ph.D., I’ve been accepted as a peer in the highest levels of the scientific community. It was hard-won recognition, the fruit of honesty, integrity and intellectual diligence. Assume what you will, but if you ever speak to me or of me that way again I’ll block you from this site.
This isn’t a game I’m playing here. Women are being lied to and harmed by those who have betrayed all that we with doctorates have been trained in and sworn to uphold.
Do I make myself clear, sir?!
You make both too much and too little of my observations.
As you may recall, when you presented the same data, and the same conclusions, in slightly greater detail, on this very site, I accepted them as perfectly valid.
When you made the same presentation, more or less, at Headline Bistro, with an impassioned introduction using some sharp adjectives and accusations, I suggested that the mode of presentation was somewhat less effective.
I stand by both observations.
The emotional reflex with which you reject ANY suggestion, however modest, that you are indeed deeply committed to a viewpoint, and that this does have SOME influence on your conclusions and the way you view the data, brings to mind the well worn phrase “He doth protest too much.”
ANY competent scientist necessarily suffers from the influence of their own viewpoint on the manner in which they view their own data, or anyone else’s.
Although you disparaged your late colleague, Dr. Gould, last time I referenced him, you would I think by and large agree with his meticulous analysis of the way 19th century racists sincerely piled up vast quantities of empirical data, and for the most part honestly convinced themselves that their pre-existing assumptions were entirely correct. They even made the accusation that their less racially-minded colleagues were deluded by humanitarian preferences which blinded them to the sad truth. These “sad truths” have now been overwhelmingly disproven, as we all know.
I accuse you of far less. I offer small grains of salt when reading your presentations, which I would offer reading anyone else’s. I am quite aware that anyone who has committed thirty or forty years to the cause of “a woman’s right to choose” would find the data you have presented quite inconvenient. I have no doubt at all that it is being brushed away out of reflex, because it is inconvenient, when it appears to my somewhat jaundiced eye to be quite reliable and worthy of serious consideration.
In fact, what you have now presented, to defend yourself at length from my modest editorial critique, is a much more convincing indictment of rearranging conclusions in response to the winds of political convenience than what you posted at Headline Bistro. Thank you for being specific. It doesn’t show that people who see a legitimate place for access to abortion are exceptionally compulsive liars, nor that their cause is entirely illegitimate; it does show that they are entirely capable of the self delusion that is common to most of humanity.
My present view, taking into consideration what you’ve presented, is that there is a risk, there is a reasonable understanding of the mechanism — not merely an appearance of statistical association — and it is relevant information, worth routinely providing. It is not relevant solely to the context of abortion, nor is it an absolute reason to never have an abortion, but it is a significant consideration.
Now, honestly, you approach all this from the position that abortion is wrong, a priori any consideration of the risk of breast cancer, or the racial disparities among women seeking abortion, or any other secondary factor. If none of these facts were sustained by evidence, you would remain no less opposed to abortion. That inspires a subtlely different manner of presentation, sometimes, than, e.g., a person primarily inspired by the hazards of women dying in childbirth. So, I do perceive, at times, a tendency to manipulate the data in favor of your desired outcome in terms of the individual choices an informed person might make.
That doesn’t make the data inaccurate. It doesn’t even make the diagnosis of mechanism erroneous. And it doesn’t mean you have any less right to advocate the behavior you deem best or most appropriate. But you, like those passionately committed to NARAL or Planned Parenthood, do have a viewpoint, as do I, as does everyone.
SJ,
You confuse a point of view with the word ‘bias’ which you have hurled at me liberally on these threads.
You fancy yourself a moderate voice of editorial critique when you are in reality a committed pro-choicer who rejects the substantial body of embryological texts proclaiming the human identity and status of the early embryo at the zygotic stage. Then you proclaim such scientific description as ‘opinion’ and assail me for ‘bias’ in presenting the truth of an entire scientific discipline.
In this you act in a self-aggrandizing, if not altogether deluded manner, which destroys all credibility for you as the voice of anyone other than that which you accuse others:
A closed mind.
Your voluminous posts cannot by the mere weight of their verbiage conceal the fact that it is you who hold an opinion that is impervious to being shaped by the substantial corpus of scientific evidence presented here; whereas my faith is continually buttressed by the burgeoning body of peer reviewed scientific literature showing just how and to what extent abortion harms women.
It’s funny how science is beginning to realize, as it reaches the summit, that God has been sitting there all along.
Dr. Nadal,
Great reply to Jenkin’s. But, i wonder, is Jenkin’s actually a real poster, or a sock puppet of a pro life poster?
Science explains things to people, and then people can accept their findings, or not. As for me, I simply look around for the confirmation/negation of some pronouncement of science, and get a personal confirmation(opinion) of that finding.
All I know is this. That my grandmother who was a “roaring twenties generation”(lived to be 99yrs.), didn’t die of breast cancer. That my mother, a great generationer, will not die of breast cancer. That my grandmother, and my mother’s relatives, and their friends didn’t die of breast cancer. That my father’s maternal side had no breast cancer in their family. That my wife’s family, which dates a hundred plus history of knowing what they died from, also has no breast cancer deaths.
But, beginning with the baby boomer’s, the children of the greatest generation, breast cancer began a march upward in killing those women. And their children are aborting at a higher rate then their mother’s.
I know women of my generation(boomers), and have seen them die of breast cancer. That’s my observation. And your “scientific finding’s” Dr. Nadal, confirm my personal opinion’s and observations.
Thanks for the science Dr. Nadal, and keep up the good work.
“You fancy yourself a moderate voice of editorial critique when you are in reality a committed pro-choicer who rejects the substantial body of embryological texts proclaiming the human identity and status of the early embryo at the zygotic stage. Then you proclaim such scientific description as ‘opinion’ and assail me for ‘bias’ for presenting the truth of an entire scientific discipline.”
I truly think this sums everything up quite nicely about SJ.
I know you won’t answer any of my comments directly SJ but here goes anyhoo….
The fact is you come on this blog as a published author and a self-proclaimed well-read person with little formal education.
You flaunt this idea that you are unbiased, neutral and truth seeking.
You also flaunt the idea that because you are so well-read you know much more than anyone with a university degree and are definitely more capable of reasoning your way out of a paper bag than any prolife person on this blog.
To write about “quickening” as a guideline for abortions, to claim that a baby is a hollow shell for months, to refuse to accept scientific research not only on the harmful effects of abortion and contraception but also on the developing fetus itself is not a sign of a well-read, thoughtful, unbiased man. It is the sign of a man desperate to prove a position that abortion is fine most of the time.
I know you won’t respond to me, but here goes it:
You accuse Dr. Nadal of having the starting position that abortion is morally wrong and then manipulating science to support his position.
Yet YOU have a bias. You believe that abortion is mostly right – in fact right up until 23 weeks or so (a position not held by the vast majority of people, I might add).
But what YOU do, Mr. Jenkins, is not manipulate facts – you mangle basic biology to suit your point of view. You deflect and confuse. You change the issue from one about a basic human right, the right to life, to arguing about whether two human beings produce another human being!
You haggle about quickening, and kicking and sentience and location and age. In fact, I’m betting that next week you can probably come up with another misfact to support your view that abortion is ok throughout the vast majority of a woman’s pregnancy -which is what you believe.
This is not a prolife position. It’s not even a moderate position.
😦
I seem to have touched a nerve, but I take no glee in that, and will try to refrain from sarcasm. This is not conducive to an honest exchange of views. I’ve been thinking that perhaps I should have left your Headline Bistro article alone, recognizing that it was intended for a different audience, one that would eat up the fierce adjectives, while here, quite properly, you were trying to emphasize the calm objectivity of the case you could present. As I acknowledged, you did a good job of that, here, and that post, only a few below this one, was not the occasion of any argument.
You appear to be confusing bias with prejudice. Prejudice is unreasoned, and usually unreasonable. Bigotry is the unrestrained practice of a prejudice. Bias, on the other hand, is something all of us have. It is indeed a point of view, although a cheap paperback dictionary will often include prejudice as a synonym. Me, you, Mary Catherine, Dr. Tiller, Benedict XVI, Barack Obama, Rudy Giuliani, Mike Huckabee, the barber I usually go to… we all have biases. We all are more effective if we recognize our biases, and how they affect our judgements.
In law, there is a formal process called stipulation, where one side will acknowledge that which is undisputed in the other sides allegations. Then, everyone can get down to brass tacks on what IS disputed.
“You fancy yourself a moderate voice of editorial critique.” I do indeed. But, I have a bias toward a certain kind of moderation, not one without principle, but one which recognizes that a worthy opponent is also motivated by principle. There are of course, unworthy opponents, who simply manipulate a conflict for ulterior motive. I regard you as a worthy opponent, motivated by principle. I regard Trent Lott and Saxby Chambliss as unworthy manipulators motivated by class privilege. Scott Brown is motivated by principle. So is Mrs. Tebow.
“you are in reality a committed pro-choicer”
Also true, and not inconsistent. I believe that given what is and is not known scientifically, the law should allow individual women to make choices regarding pregnancy. I believe that if you or Mary Catherine or Bethany or Michelle can persuade any woman to carry their pregnancy to term (you each have a markedly different approach), it is your free speech right to try, and each woman’s right to choose to follow your advice and pleading. I opposed criminal sanctions during the first trimester, and a portion of the second trimester. I believe there is a good case to be made for re-examining how late in the second trimester — but it is difficult to do that when those committed to a “pro-life” position will not discuss it, because you will settle for nothing less than legal prohibition from the moment of conception.
Next you allege that I reject a “substantial body of embryological texts proclaiming the human identity and status of the early embryo at the zygotic stage.”
I note first, that you are changing the subject — not necessarily an illegitimate thing to do, but one to be done consciously. The mechanisms causing breast cancer and the human identity of the zygote are distinct questions. Each can stand on its own merits, irrespective of the other.
This allegation is denied. I have not rejected either the empirical facts, or the language, of the texts you have cited. I have accepted them at some length — to which you have never responded directly. You have only repeated the same allegation that I reject a substantial body of embryological texts.
You allege that I “assail me for ‘bias’ in presenting the truth of an entire scientific discipline.”
I do see a bias, but more importantly, I see you drawing a conclusion that is not a matter of scientific fact. I’ve gone over this at length, and gone over it again in summary, and you have never squarely responded, but here it is one more time. Is the product of conception between a homo sapiens male and a home sapiens female a human zygote? Of course it is. Is it a human being? Reasonable people may differ about that, because the statements you have cited from innumerable texts do not answer the question. You are intolerant of any other understanding drawn from the undisputed facts, because you are, a priori, passionately and sincerely committed to a cause which mandates one interpretation.
I distinguished between oaks and acorns, Dan denied that there is a significant difference. In an attempt to get one of our many discussions refocused, I acknowledged the logic of viewing development from a zygote to a dead 92 year old as epistemologically unbroken, then gave my reasons for seeing some modest breaks in the epistemology. You never answered that either.
“you act in a self-aggrandizing, if not altogether deluded manner”
This allegation is denied. I have acknowledged many points that you have made, and you have graciously acknowledged that on some occasions. I have looked at ways to incorporate valid points into my own view of what is right and just. Naturally you don’t find that sufficient, because you have a different view of what is right and just. I accept that. But there is nothing self-aggrandizing or deluded about it. Take breast cancer for example: your primary motivation, although certainly not your sole motivation, is to add to the arguments for overturning Roe v. Wade and legally banning abortion. My view is, yes, there is some well developed material here. Let’s make it available, let’s look at all the ways to use this knowledge to reduce the incidence of breast cancer. A woman might, or might not, decide that this information over-rides whatever reason she might have for seeking an abortion. If it does not, there may be precautions she can take, or prophylactic measures which could be developed, to assist her in reducing the risk. You of course would oppose any such measures, if it reduced the poignancy of this perfectly valid line of research as an argument for criminalizing abortion. That’s not illegitimate on your part, but it goes well beyond the valid science you have presented.
“it is you who hold an opinion that is impervious to being shaped by the substantial corpus of scientific evidence presented here”
Me as distinct from whom? I’m the only person in the world who can be so characterized? Or me as distinct from Mary Catherine — whose writing here almost always reminds me of a five year old sticking out her tongue and wagging her hands behind her ears? The allegation is, in any event, denied. I have given considerable thought to the scientific evidence presented here. I have also carefully unwound what is scientific, from the advocacy of a viewpoint. Since your point IS advocacy, you find that objectionable. It is not wrong for you to link your extensive knowledge of science to your beliefs, but to cast vicariously dismissive accusations at anyone who tries to distinguish the two is really unworthy of your claim to scientific objectivity.
“It’s funny how science is beginning to realize, as it reaches the summit, that God has been sitting there all along.”
Ah, Dr. Nadal, if we were not so intently locking horns on one issue that is unavoidably inflammatory, we could have many long conversations fully agreeing on that point and fleshing it out gloriously. Two brief examples: astronomical observation has for the past fifty years been confirming most of the first three verses of Genesis — except of course our radio telescopes can’t PROVE that God said “Let there be light.” We can only observe the results. But how did Moses know that, without the aid of the Hubble telescope? Also, genetic paleontology is tending toward a solid case that humanity emerged from a genetic bottleneck within the past 50,000 years, meaning a very small number of a species were physically isolated from all others of their kind, and emerged with speech, art, vastly improved intellectually capacity — in a geologically infinitesemal period of time. I find that awfully congruent with Genesis, although some disagree.
“Or me as distinct from Mary Catherine — whose writing here almost always reminds me of a five year old sticking out her tongue and wagging her hands behind her ears?”
sweet! out of the mouth of babes 😉
But, sadly, I’m not the bigot, racist nor the one with the bias.
I believe that two human beings create another living human being from conception.
I believe that ALL human beings have the dignity of being a full human person from conception due to the fact that they are a human being and that any attempt to make that not so is arbitrary at best.
I believe that ALL human beings are persons and I don’t discriminate based on location, age, stage of development or size as you do.
“Is the product of conception between a homo sapiens male and a home sapiens female a human zygote? Of course it is. Is it a human being?”
Siarlys Jenkins what must it be? Two human beings cannot HELP but produce another human being!
Your ignorance of basic biology OR you refusal to submit your intellect to the truth of the science is astounding.
It confounds all of my colleagues here. 😦
We have the science on our side and as time goes by, more and more science will continue to expand our knowledge of the incredible secret life of the unborn child.
Abortion is a human rights issue. It is about the smallest, most helpless of us being denied the right to life simply because they cannot speak up for themselves – YET. Simply because they are weak and have no real way to defend themselves.
It is no different from the issue of slavery that was faced 200 years ago.
The “negro” was deemed a subhuman. They were enslaved, raped, murdered and beaten. Their families were broken apart. The were sold and resold. They were worked to death.
What you advocate in your attempt to be magnanimous and tolerant by supporting abortion, is murder, dismemberment and torture.
It was when people began to “know” these people from another continent and another race that the evidence became clear that a whole group of people were enslaving another group of people, no different from themselves.
Siarlys Jenkins – you believe a unborn baby is a hollow shell. In all my years in prolife work, I’ve NEVER met anyone who has ever used this term before. Quite simply, amazing.
What I see on this blog is not a stupid man but a man who lacks a heart. I’m sorry Mr Jenkins but any change from you needs to come from your heart and not your intellect.
You give me great reason to believe that you are not so separated from abortion as you maintain you are. Otherwise you would be more open to considering ALL the facts and simply not being so pigheaded.
have a glorious day remembering this: 3700 babies will die today because you and thousands of people believe they are not human beings or at best inconvenient human beings. 😦
I rest my case.
have a glorious day remembering this: 3700 babies will die today because you and thousands of people like you believe they are not human beings or at best inconvenient human beings. 😦
glad to see that you recognize this!
you also stated in a later entry on this blog that you believe a change of heart is important, yet NOT for yourself…
Perhaps you will reconsider……
If they are not human beings, then they are not babies, and they don’t die. Think of a Hydra. I think the Hydra is the largest and most complex animal which as only one sex, and reproduces by budding. At what point in the budding process is it legitimate for a Hydra to tear off the bud, on the ground that it doesn’t want to reproduce? At what point is the bud, though still attached, an independent life?
It is, admittedly, not a very good comparison. Hydras are not, to the best of our knowledge, made in the image of God, although God must have had some purpose for the Hydra, or for the process which potentially might produce a Hydra, on the way to making us. It is true that the fetus doesn’t gradually emerge from the uterine wall — it drifts down the fallopian tube and attaches itself. Does that make it more like a parasite, or a corpuscle? Bad questions — but logic is inadequate, because so many analogies could be drawn.
You can keep trying for a change of heart — but so far, I am not inspired to change. I am satisfied with the viewpoint I have been expressing. What I meant to communicate is that trying to change hearts is better than trying to impose criminal penalties.
[…] Nadal: Unfortunately, it’s not so much an opinion as a matter of fact. On February 22, I wrote an article in Headline Bistro detailing this. Some researchers who favor abortion say one thing in epidemiology journals which few people read, […]
[…] The full story on Brinton’s duplicity is here. […]