Anti-choice groups in Georgia have proclaimed tomorrow “Pro-Life Day at the Capitol,” with plans to push lawmakers to support several Republican-sponsored bills.
As we reported last week, there’s some crazy shit going down in Georgia. But this latest bill really takes the cake. Senate Bill 77, the “Woman's Right to Know Act,” would require doctors who perform abortions to tell women that the procedure may cause breast cancer. Um--didn’t the National Cancer Institute already come out and say that there is NO LINK between abortion and breast cancer?
I guess science is beside the point when you’re trying to use scare tactics to rob women of choice. Ugh.
Pro-choice advocates in the area are concerned that Georgia is quickly turning into the new Mississippi. “Basically the national right-to-life movement used Mississippi as a test case to see how far they can go to eliminate abortion in spite of Roe v. Wade,” said Becky Rafter, executive director of NARAL Pro-Choice Georgia.
Frightening.
Make sure to check out the full article from The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, which also lists other anti-choice bills being pushed.
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Scare tactics are used by both sides. Seems you can't swing a cat in an argument with a pro-choicer without running into the "back alley boogeyman."
Most pro-choicers can't engage in a debate without raising this canard.
Except that we have testimonials from doctors who treated the results of these "canard's" work. Women with perforated uteruses and intestines , with blood poisening (sepsis) and massive hemorhaging. Women who *died* from someone's botched or unsterile work, generally in a great deal of pain. This happened, here, in this country, within the last century. This is NOT a boogeyman.
The studies done on the abortion/breast cancer link have been _inconclusive_, which means most research doctors would say that we need to study the subject more until we get results that agree with each other. And actually, there was a very good study published in the New England Journal of Medicine that was done from public records in Denmark that more or less disproves the link as it looked at a large population over a long time. Here's the link:
http://content.nejm.org/cgi/content/short/336/2/81
(Non-medical/statistician types will get the most useful information out of the abstract.)
I agree that more study would be good. In the meantime, the language should be (as any good doctor would use) "abortion MAY increase your risks of breast cancer, but the studies have been INCONCLUSIVE". That would give women the information they undoubtedly want without resorting to scare tactics.
I have a few links in an old blog entry (http://trunkloadofpenguins.blogspot.com/2004/11/what.html) that deal with that topic; I was able to find very little actually supporting a breast cancer/abortion link.
I'm honestly all for telling women about the risks, but only if they're really there.
Sorry, no, the Danish study is DEFINITIVE for first trimester abortion, and there is no link between abortion and breast cancer. It is not definitive for second trimester abortion, since there were so few of these done that the statistics do not have enough "power" to answer that question. An NIH/NCI consensus conference dealt with this last year. End of story. NO CURRENT MEDICAL TEXTBOOK dealing with breast cancer makes the link. Nada. I have to read cancer epidemiology, and I know.
NancyP:
Thanks for the update -- that's the first comment I've read on two blogs that was made by someone that needs to know this stuff.
So essentially, any link between breast cancer and first trimester abortions has been more or less disproven, yes? I am just double checking that I understood you, here. It also sounds as if there are no current textbooks that state a link -- does that mean that the accepted medical standpoint is that there is no link?
Have there been any studies done on second trimester abortions and cancer links? I didn't find any in my search of the NEJM, but I am not a doctor. I may have missed something, esp. since I don't know which journals the oncologists read.
Thanks for weighing in on this subject! The last I had heard was "inconclusive", which more or less means the jury is still out. I really appreciate getting a more current opinion.