Catholic Fire

Part 1 of 4 By Joel Brind, Ph.D. By way of background, abortion raises a woman's risk for breast cancer in two ways; the debate is over the second, not the first. Scientists have long understood that the risk of breast cancer is reduced when a woman completes a full-term pregnancy. This "protective effect of childbearing" is lost with an abortion. The second way abortion increases the likelihood of breast cancer is that an abortion leaves a woman with more cancer-vulnerable breast tissue than she had before she became pregnant. In 1957, a nationwide study in Japan published in the Japanese Journal of Cancer Research found that women who had breast cancer reported having had three times as many pregnancies end with an induced abortion. Of course, there were few studies in those days, as induced abortion was neither legal nor common in most of the world -- and breast cancer was not that common either! Most studies, in fact, did not distinguish between induced abo...