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Abortion and Breast Cancer: Only Fuzzy Math Can Make the ABC Link Disappear.
To borrow from Yogi Berra, it looks like "dja-vu all over again." A supposedly definitive study of immense statistical power, published in a top medical journal, has once again allegedly proven there is no link between an induced abortion and an increase in breast cancer (the ABC link, for short).
This time, we're told, it was "a collaborative re-analysis of data from 53 epidemiological studies, including 83,000 women with breast cancer from 16 countries." It was authored by a prestigious group of Oxford researchers and published in March in the Lancet, one of the most prominent medical journals in the world.
In a pre-publication media blitz, lead author Valerie Beral wasted no time. She told the Associated Press, "The totality of the worldwide epidemiological evidence indicates that pregnancies ended by induced abortion do not have adverse effects on women's subsequent risk of developing breast cancer." Beral also told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, "Scientifically, this really is a full analysis of the current data," suggesting a truly comprehensive review of the data.
In truth, the Beral study is seriously flawed. Its conclusions do not stand up to modest scrutiny, let alone close scrutiny. For starters, the claim that this is a "full analysis" is entirely false and seriously misleading.
With 41 studies published since 1957 that have data on the question of induced abortion and its relationship to breast cancer, one would think that Beral et al. started with these 41 studies, and then added 12 studies with previously unpublished data. Not so.
They arrived at the aforementioned figure of 53 studies mostly by deleting completely acceptable studies and then adding studies as yet unpublished and thus not peer-reviewed.
1) For acceptable reasons they threw out two studies: "specific information on whether pregnancies ended as spontaneous or induced abortions had not been recorded systematically for women with breast cancer and a comparison group."
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