We had debated the question of when human life begins, but reached no agreement. Now my friend was studying medical textbooks about how a woman’s body functions. So I asked her, for my own information, how a woman’s body “knows” when to shift from a monthly cycle to a nine-month cycle. She explained that a fertilized ovum releases a chemical signal that completely alters the woman’s hormonal balance and sets her body on the path of pregnancy. I just sat there and listened, marveling quietly: “The baby announces its presence!”
My first question concerned the start of pregnancy. My second question was: what happens to a woman’s body when pregnancy is artificially ended? If someone was making a nine-month journey by balloon, a steep descent to a sudden landing would be dangerous. Surely interrupting such a complex physiological process as pregnancy would have some harmful effect on a woman’s delicately balanced metabolism? My friend had no answer.
Our conversation took place in 1978. Abortion had been legalized in the United States five years before that. Now, in the year 2000, headlines in pro-life publications remind me often of my talk with Carla. One news story suggests that medical science has discovered the answer to my second question.
Statistical studies over the years have produced convincing evidence that there is a link between abortion and the incidence of breast cancer. Thirty-four studies investigating a possible connection between breast cancer and abortion have been conducted worldwide. Twenty-seven of them (about 80%) reach the conclusion that having an abortion puts a woman at a significantly greater risk of developing breast cancer. As of 1998, ten out of eleven American studies supported the same conclusion.
In August of this year, Britain’s Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists published guidelines that validated the work of an American endocrinologist who has researched the physiological connection between abortion and breast cancer (referred to as the “ABC link”). Joel Brind, Ph.D., a professor of biology and endocrinology at Baruch College of City University of New York, has been studying abortion and breast cancer since 1982.
Dr. Brind gives a hormonal explanation for the ABC link. At the onset of pregnancy, estrogen levels in a woman’s body increase. This includes the level of estradiol, which stimulates breast cells to divide more often and more rapidly, in preparation for the eventual task of nursing the newborn child. The cells that respond to estradiol are undifferentiated breast cells. Once they have been differentiated into milk-producing cells (by a mechanism not yet fully understood), breast cells can no longer be stimulated to reproduce.
Now the undifferentiated breast cells are also susceptible to the effects of carcinogens, which can result in cancerous tumors later in life. Therefore, if a woman has gone through some weeks of a normal pregnancy and then has an abortion, she is left with more of these cancer-vulnerable cells than she had in her breasts before she was pregnant. In addition, any abnormal, potentially cancer-forming cells already present have also been stimulated to multiply. The net effect, statistically, is a greater probability that a cancerous tumor may someday arise. The risk increases dramatically for a woman whose first pregnancy ends in abortion.
In contrast, a full-term pregnancy results in the full differentiation of the breast tissue for the purpose of milk production. This leaves fewer cancer-vulnerable cells in the breasts than were there before the pregnancy began. It is well known that a full term pregnancy lowers a woman’s risk of ever developing breast cancer.
If the changes that start to take place in a woman’s metabolism at the beginning of pregnancy are not permitted to run their course, her body is left more vulnerable than if she carried her baby to term. Pro-abortion spokespersons often claim that pro-lifers care only about “the fetus” and not about the woman. There is more and more medical evidence, however, that performing an abortion on a pregnant woman is not “caring” for her health at all, to say nothing of the emotional and psychological scarring of abortion.
Human life always remains a mystery that should be treated with reverence. This is especially true of a woman, who has the potential to bring a new human being into the world. The pro-life position genuinely respects both the child supported in the womb and the marvelous dynamic equilibrium of the mother’s body.
My friend Carla got married in the late 1970’s and soon quit her job at the “women’s health center.” Eventually she became the mother of two sons of her own.
Related Webpage
For medical and statistical findings about the abortion-breast cancer link, visit the webpage of Joel Brind, Ph.D., www.abortioncancer.com
