Loren Pechtel

dk: You brought up Europe, I brought up Ireland to refute you’re claims about Europe. There are PC and PL supporters in Europe and Ireland.
Loren: Refute?! You did no such thing! I said *SOME* European countries had 1/10th of our teen pregnancy rate. You never gave a teen pregnancy rate for Iceland, and I never said *ALL* the countries were that way.

dk: The research does distinguish between 1) never pregnant 2) induced abortion 3) spontaneous abortion and 4) delay of first full term delivery.
Loren: I didn't find anything like that in what you linked.

“Induced abortion increases breast cancer risk independently of its effect in delaying first full term pregnancy.” - Joel Brind, Ph.D., Professor of Endocrinology, Text of Oral Testimony given before the Reproductive Health Drugs Advisory Committee of the Food and Drug Administration at its Public Meeting of July 19, 1996

I've already pointed out that such testimony is basically worthless.

Loren: Your utter blindness isn't an argument against abortion. There certainly are unwanted children!
dk: I’m not arguing against abortion, but since abortion has been legalized the number of unwanted children has skyrocketed. Margaret Sanger rationalized abortion on the mantra said, “Every Child a wanted Child”. She was a snake oil salesman. In a PL world the idea of abortion as “a cure for unwanted children” is absurd. The idea was clearly the calamitous brainchild of PC social engineers that assert “the wanton destruction of human life” fixes and empowers people.
Loren: I've already pointed out that you haven't excluded other factors. After all, you'll find a strong correlation between the number of priests in a city and the number of crimes committed there.

Loren: I'm saying that making her raise a child that she's not ready for and does not want is a punishment.
dk: I’m not sure where you got the idea that children are a punishment, it had to be from your PC handlers.
Loren: You're poor, you suddenly have a child to raise that you didn't want. It's not a punishment?!

Loren Pechtel

You seem to think that falling birth rates are a reason abortion should be banned.

dk

No, I think abortion should be banned because it causes grave problems. People that aspire to political power on a steed of death undermine the future with skepticism, cynicism and apathy. At the most fundamental level Life has no power over death.

alek0

A number of medications and medical procedures can cause grave problems. Shall we ban them all?

If your concern is really about women, why not spend time and effort to eliminate unnecessary episiotomies and C sections and inform women about all the risks involved for example? Or maybe butchering women's bodies doesn't matter when there is a healthy baby?

Edited to add: How about banning infertility treatments? There have been case studies of ovarian cancer after fertility treatment?

How about banning cosmetic surgery and enforcing 24h to think about it? It can have grave consequences, too, and people are usually not well informed on the risk.

Would you support banning smoking? It causes grave harm.

How about banning fast foods and sodas? Obesity causes great harm too.
======================================
Concerning abortion and breast cancer, so far you have failed to conclusively prove that there is a link.

I understand that you want abortion banned or if that not possible discouraged. But that has nothing to do with science and nothing to do with concern for women. That's what happens when science and politics collide

dk

dk: You brought up Europe, I brought up Ireland to refute you’re claims about Europe. There are PC and PL supporters in Europe and Ireland.
Loren: Refute?! You did no such thing! I said *SOME* European countries had 1/10th of our teen pregnancy rate. You never gave a teen pregnancy rate for Iceland, and I never said *ALL* the countries were that way.
dk: Ok, so abortion isn’t necessarily connected to stds or unwanted children. I’m happy.

dk: The research does distinguish between 1) never pregnant 2) induced abortion 3) spontaneous abortion and 4) delay of first full term delivery.
Loren: I didn't find anything like that in what you linked. “Induced abortion increases breast cancer risk independently of its effect in delaying first full term pregnancy.” - Joel Brind, Ph.D., Professor of Endocrinology, Text of Oral Testimony given before the Reproductive Health Drugs Advisory Committee of the Food and Drug Administration at its Public Meeting of July 19, 1996
I've already pointed out that such testimony is basically worthless.
Loren: Your utter blindness isn't an argument against abortion. There certainly are unwanted children!
dk: I’ve made NO argument against abortion, I argue the PC and PL politics drive the science, and when politics and science collide science gets trashed.

dk: I’m not arguing against abortion, but since abortion has been legalized the number of unwanted children has skyrocketed. Margaret Sanger rationalized abortion on the mantra said, “Every Child a wanted Child”. She was a snake oil salesman. In a PL world the idea of abortion as “a cure for unwanted children” is absurd. The idea was clearly the calamitous brainchild of PC social engineers that assert “the wanton destruction of human life” fixes and empowers people.
Loren: I've already pointed out that you haven't excluded other factors. After all, you'll find a strong correlation between the number of priests in a city and the number of crimes committed there.
dk: What??? We simply need to trace political movements back to their source, and in the Modern Era people use science to rationalize their corrupt agenda. For example… Malthusianism, Mercantilism, Capitalism, Imperialism, Fascism, Socialism, and Communism all parlayed with science to rationalize a corrupt agenda i.e. opium trade, slave trade, white slavery, forced labor and eugenics. The harmonics never change, a few people scheme to sell utopia, but unmask the scheme and it reduces to an egotistic minority asserting a Right to live large and fat off productive people. Eventually they get so greedy and corrupt they break the backs of productive people and all hell breaks loose.

Loren: I'm saying that making her raise a child that she's not ready for and does not want is a punishment.
dk: I’m not sure where you got the idea that children are a punishment, it had to be from your PC handlers.
Loren: You're poor, you suddenly have a child to raise that you didn't want. It's not a punishment?!
dk: Ohhh, so children cause of poverty. But not all children, only the children of the poor. I’m Irish honey, and I can tell you children don’t cause poverty, fat cats living large off productive people cause poverty.

Loren Pechtel

Originally posted by dk
[B]dk: You brought up Europe, I brought up Ireland to refute you’re claims about Europe. There are PC and PL supporters in Europe and Ireland.
Loren: Refute?! You did no such thing! I said *SOME* European countries had 1/10th of our teen pregnancy rate. You never gave a teen pregnancy rate for Iceland, and I never said *ALL* the countries were that way.
dk: Ok, so abortion isn’t necessarily connected to stds or unwanted children. I’m happy.
Loren: Going back to the original point, the experience with the European countries that are open about sex is that contraception is much more effective than you are giving it credit for.

Loren: I've already pointed out that you haven't excluded other factors. After all, you'll find a strong correlation between the number of priests in a city and the number of crimes committed there.
dk: What???
Loren: Thought that might get you. The reason for the correlation should be obvious if you think about it. I'm not saying priests cause crime, I presented that as an example of obvious correlations not always meaning causation.

Loren: You're poor, you suddenly have a child to raise that you didn't want. It's not a punishment?!
dk: Ohhh, so children cause of poverty. But not all children, only the children of the poor. I’m Irish honey, and I can tell you children don’t cause poverty, fat cats living large off productive people cause poverty.
Loren: The biggest factor I see keeping people down is having kids before one is ready to support them.
Besides, if kids don't cause poverty, try raising 20 of them. Can you afford it? No? Then don't say they don't cause poverty!

dk

dk: Ok, so abortion isn’t necessarily connected to stds or unwanted children. I’m happy.
Loren: Going back to the original point, the experience with the European countries that are open about sex is that contraception is much more effective than you are giving it credit for.
dk: I have no idea what you're talking about. stds certainly don't make contraceptives effective. I agree contraceptives and abortion eliminate children. Still, if contraceptives were effective then abortion wouldn't be necessary. Nations and civilizations that solve problems by destroying human life have started down a path of death. The psychological affects being fatal.

Loren: I've already pointed out that you haven't excluded other factors. After all, you'll find a strong correlation between the number of priests in a city and the number of crimes committed there.
dk: What???
Loren: Thought that might get you. The reason for the correlation should be obvious if you think about it. I'm not saying priests cause crime, I presented that as an example of obvious correlations not always meaning causation.
dk: I know what correlation means, and Brind offers a meta-analysis..."The authors reported *1612 that seventy-seven percent of rats whose first pregnancy was artificially aborted developed breast cancer after subsequent exposure to a chemical carcinogen, compared to zero percent of similarly exposed rats in the control group whose pregnancy was carried to term. " --- The Abortion - Breast Cancer Link 5

dk: Ohhh, so children cause of poverty. But not all children, only the children of the poor. I’m Irish honey, and I can tell you children don’t cause poverty, fat cats living large off productive people cause poverty.
Loren: The biggest factor I see keeping people down is having kids before one is ready to support them.
Besides, if kids don't cause poverty, try raising 20 of them. Can you afford it? No? Then don't say they don't cause poverty! [/B]
dk: You da boss, whatever you say boss. I just a dumb iliterit breeder.

Is that how its Loren? Is that what makes you feel good, takin care of us breeders dat don't know no better.

Dr Rick

Cancer Epidemiol Biomarkers Prev 2003 Mar;12(3):209-14
Induced abortion, miscarriage, and breast cancer risk of young women.
Mahue-Giangreco M, Ursin G, Sullivan-Halley J, Bernstein L.

Department of Preventive Medicine and Norris Comprehensive Cancer Center, Keck School of Medicine, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, California 90033.

Early studies of breast cancer raised substantial concern regarding risk associated with induced abortion and miscarriage. Literature reviews suggest that study findings depend heavily on the comparison group and that the use of parous women as a reference group for nulliparous women may artificially inflate risk....Breast cancer risk was reduced among nulliparous women with a history of induced abortion relative to nulligravid women, although the risk estimate was imprecise. Risk declined as the number of induced abortions increased (P = 0.04). Our results do not support the hypothesis that induced abortion or miscarriage increase the breast cancer risk of young women.

Science 2003 Mar 7;299(5612):1498
Cancer risk. Review rules out abortion-cancer link.
Couzin J.

Int J Cancer 2003 Feb 20;103(5):676-9

Abortions and breast cancer: record-based case-control study.

Erlandsson G, Montgomery SM, Cnattingius S, Ekbom A.

Department of Medical Epidemiology, Karolinska Institutet, Gunnar.Erlandsson

It has been suggested that abortions leave the breast epithelium in a proliferative state with an increased susceptibility to carcinogenesis. Results from previous studies of induced or spontaneous abortions and risk of subsequent breast cancer are contradictory, probably due to methodological considerations. We investigated the relationship between abortions and subsequent breast cancer risk in a case-control study using prospectively recorded exposure information...In conclusion, neither a history of induced nor spontaneous abortions is associated with an increased risk of breast cancer. Our data suggest a protective effect of pregnancies regardless of outcome.

N Engl J Med 1997 Jan 9;336(2)
Induced abortion and the risk of breast cancer.

Melbye M, Wohlfahrt J, Olsen JH, Frisch M, Westergaard T, Helweg-Larsen K, Andersen PK.

Department of Epidemiology Research, Danish Epidemiology Science Center, Statens Serum Institut, Copenhagen, Denmark.

BACKGROUND: It has been hypothesized that an interrupted pregnancy might increase a woman's risk of breast cancer because breast cells could proliferate without the later protective effect of differentiation...No increases in risk were found in subgroups defined according to age at abortion, parity, time since abortion, or age at diagnosis of breast cancer....CONCLUSIONS: Induced abortions have no overall effect on the risk of breast cancer.

And as for Dr Brind:

"My goal," says Joel Brind, "is to expose the linkage between abortion and breast cancer in the public mind. When women realize this is something that's dangerous to women, who's going to choose it?"

The vast majority of epidemiologists say Brind's conclusions are dead wrong. They say he conducted an unsound analysis based on incomplete data and drew conclusions that meshed with his own pro-life views. They say that epidemiology, the study of diseases in populations, is an inexact science that requires practitioners to look critically at their own work, searching for factors that might corrupt the results and drawing conclusions only when they see strong and consistent evidence. "Circumspection, unfortunately, is what you have to do to practice epidemiology," says Polly Newcomb, a researcher at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle. "That's something Brind is incapable of doing. He has such a strong prior belief in the association [between abortion and cancer] that he just can't evaluate the data critically.

For Newcomb and many others, Brind's crusade highlights challenges that face those who are trying to understand the origins of diseases like cancer, where there isn't necessarily a straight line from A to Z. The crusade also serves as a warning about what happens when politics drives science. For laypeople who are trying to make sense of scientific controversies, it's a reminder of why it's important to study the research itself rather than simply trust the pronouncements of experts.

One conclusion researchers have drawn is that the poor design of many abortion-cancer studies produced results that exaggerated risks faced by women who undergo the procedure. Until recently, most of the published papers on the subject were based on what epidemiologists call case-control studies. Researchers would find a group of cases—women diagnosed with breast cancer—and ask them whether they had had abortions earlier in their lives. They would also survey a group of controls—healthy women who were contacted by random telephone dialing or some other method. The scientists would adjust for variables such as age, reproductive history, and family health history, then perform a calculation to determine the relative risk of having an abortion.

One variable, though, that epidemiologists can't eliminate is whether a woman admits to a researcher that she has had an abortion—because such an admission is still a source of shame for many people. This is the point at which results are most likely to go awry. By contrast, patients are always looking for clues to their illnesses, and so "women who have breast cancer will search their souls, and be very likely to search deeply in their memories, and disclose things that might be embarrassing," says David Grimes, clinical professor of obstetrics, gynecology, and epidemiology at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine in Chapel Hill. "But a woman who does not have the disease and is picked at random from the community is very unlikely to disclose to an anonymous researcher knocking on the door that she had an abortion in 1992." Epidemiologists call this phenomenon response bias, and they've found evidence that it can contaminate studies on abortion and breast cancer.

Brind dismisses response bias as an unproven hypothesis, but others have found ample evidence for it. In Sweden, epidemiologist Britt-Marie Lindefors-Harris of the Karolinska Institute took advantage of her country's nationwide registry of legal abortions. In a project documented in the American Journal of Epidemiology, Lindefors-Harris conducted a case-control study of abortion and breast cancer, but with a twist: She checked government records to see if the participants were telling the truth about their reproductive histories. Many of them, it turns out, were not. Out of 829 women, 29 appeared to misrepresent their abortion history, with the vast majority of underreporting coming from healthy women in the control group. Based on those numbers, Lindefors-Harris calculated that "an observed increase in risk of up to 50 percent may be caused by response bias."

In January 1997, three months after Brind's analysis appeared in Epidemiology and Community Health, a Danish epidemiologist published a paper in The New England Journal of Medicine that, according to many of his colleagues, made much previous research on the subject moot. Mads Melbye of the Statens Serum Institute in Copenhagen, Denmark, looked at the records of 1.5 million women born in his country between 1935 and 1978. Like neighboring Sweden, Denmark records all abortions; it also has a national cancer registry. Melbye linked these two databases—and found a relative risk of 1.00. In other words, women who underwent abortions developed breast cancer at exactly the same rate as women who didn't. (Melbye did find a risk of almost 1.9 for women who had abortions in the 18th week or later, but such procedures are rare and done only in emergencies.) With so large a population and no opportunity for response bias, Melbye's study convinced many scientists that earlier case-control studies had been tainted. "The story of abortion and breast cancer is essentially closed by this last study," says Carlo La Vecchia, an epidemiologist at the Negri Mario Institute for Pharmacological Research in Milan, Italy.

"I think the Melbye study pretty much clinches it," says Lynn Rosenberg, associate director of the Slone Epidemiology Center at Boston University. "The numbers were huge. The larger the study, the more statistically powerful it is, and the more stable the results are."

Here's what really happens when politics and science collide:

Public health organizations across North America and Western Europe have downplayed the danger of terminating a pregnancy, but last summer the National Cancer Institute suddenly shifted gears. The institute, a research agency of the federal government, had published a fact sheet in March that said, "The current body of scientific evidence suggests that women who have had either induced or spontaneous abortions have the same risk as other women for developing breast cancer." This statement was withdrawn from the agency's Web site in July 2002 after Representative Christopher Smith, cochairman of the House Pro-Life Caucus, wrote to Secretary of Health and Human Services Tommy Thompson, calling the fact sheet "scientifically inaccurate and misleading to the public." In particular, Smith criticized the institute for failing to cite Brind's work, which he called "the only comprehensive review and meta-analysis" of the abortion-cancer link. In November the institute said the information had been taken down "to review it for accuracy," adding that Smith's letter "was a factor" in the decision. The institute has issued an interim statement that calls the data "inconsistent." Other credible agencies have been less reticent about dismissing the link outright. "Results from epidemiological studies are reassuring in that they show no consistent effect of first-trimester induced abortion upon a woman's risk of breast cancer later in life," says a June 2000 fact sheet posted on the World Health Organization's Web site.

Excerts from The scientist who hated abortion and did something about it

dk

Dr Rick I'm happy to report we agree. when science and politics collide science gets trashed. PC people say abortion is safe, PL people say abortion is not safe. People are predisposed to believe what they want. Ironically 30+ years after Roe decision, which rationalized abortion to protect a woman's individual autonomy and privacy, perpetuates great consternation that divides the medical community. The fact remains Breast Cancer Rates have increased 40% since Roe, and the penumbra privacy rights used to legalize abortion make bias the order of public opinion. Nothing we can see makes any difference.

brighid

It may very well be true that breast cancer has increased since Roe, but you have failed to prove a correlation between abortion and breast cancer. There are many reasonable explanations for the increase one is greater use of early testing and mammography, another would be better record keeping and reporting and yet another would be increased environmental carcinogens ... the list goes on and at the VERY bottom of that list is a 1.00 link between breast cancer and abortion.

Brighid