Abortion and Breast Cancer:.(link between abortion and breast cancer)

Here I go again--playing right into their hands: "Brind has publicized his findings widely at pro-life meetings." So reports Dr. Tim Davidson in a high profile "Personal View" article in the December 2001 issue of Lancet Oncology, a publication of the United Kingdom's most prestigious medical journal.

Davidson's paper--titled "Abortion and breast cancer: a hard decision made harder"--is a review of reviews, of sorts, on the abortion-breast cancer link (ABC link). It is clearly designed to show that by a margin of three to one the consensus of reviewers is that the evidence for the ABC link is unconvincing. The "one" is my own "comprehensive review and meta-analysis" which I and three colleagues published back in 1996 in the British Medical Association's epidemiology journal.

Then, Davidson proceeds to my "pro-life" publicity, and that "Critics of the paper have raised concerns.E" You get the picture: By the end of the paper, one would think the ABC link is pure pro-life propaganda.

What to make of this? It is noteworthy, for starters, that he summarizes our paper's results and conclusions quite accurately.

We did indeed report a statistically significant, 30% overall increase in breast cancer risk among women who had chosen abortion. That was the result of our summary of all available worldwide published data. And we did indeed conclude "that induced abortion should be regarded as an independent risk factor for breast cancer, irrespective of parity or timing of abortion relative to first term pregnancy."

What is most curious about the Davidson paper is that no sooner does one read erudite, clearly written, and accurate passages, then one comes upon misrepresentations which take the breath away from any reader well versed in the subject.

Take, for example, Davidson's lucid explanation for the theory behind the ABC link. A breast surgeon himself, he lays out the physiology and hormonal dependence of breast development with superb clarity, even including an excellent diagram of breast tissue structure.