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Dear Friends:
Anti-Christian bigotry reared its ugly head in a Washington Monthly article in October. The author attacked four experts including Joel Brind, Ph.D., David Reardon, Ph.D., David Prentice, Ph.D and Joe McIlhaney, M.D. Their work represents a grave threat to Big Abortion and the bottom line. The author implied that their research should be disregarded because their Christian faith impeded their abilities to conduct objective scientific research.
Spread the word.
Sincerely,
Karen Malec
Coalition on Abortion/Breast Cancer
ABORTION-BREAST CANCER NEWS HEADLINES
Anti-Christian Bigotry and the Washington Monthly
By Karen Malec
October 29, 2004
Anti-Christian bigotry reared its ugly head in a Washington Monthly article by Chris Mooney in October. The article, "Research and destroy: How the religious right promotes its own 'experts' to combat mainstream science," amounted to a public relations sham on behalf of three industries: abortion, pharmaceutical and biotech. [1]
The author made personal attacks on internationally respected scientists whose work threatens Big Abortion and the bottom line. The experts are:
1) Joel Brind, Ph.D., lead author of a comprehensive review and meta-analysis of the abortion-breast cancer (ABC) research, head the Breast Cancer Prevention Institute and professor of endocrinology at Baruch College, City University of New York; [2]
2) David Reardon, Ph.D., director of the Elliott Institute and an expert on the link between abortion and increased risk of mood disorders, depression, suicide and substance abuse;
3) Joe McIlhaney, M.D., an expert on sexually transmitted diseases, an obstetrician/gynecologist and president of the Medical Institute for Sexual Health; and
4) David Prentice, Ph.D, an expert on stem cell research and professor of life sciences at Indiana State University.
Although these experts are involved in heated scientific debates that adversely impact Big Abortion's business interests, Mooney didn't frame it as such. Rather, he used a very clever marketing scheme frequently employed by Big Abortion. He framed the debates as conservative vs. liberal and religious vs. atheistic ideologies that oppose "mainstream science."
Perhaps Mooney isn't aware that Big Tobacco was accused of corrupting "mainstream science" with its money a half-century ago. According to two writers, including Dr. David Kessler who formerly headed the Food and Drug Administration, Big Tobacco gave grants to the American Medical Association, Harvard, UCLA, Sloan Kettering, the University of Kentucky and others. [3,4]
Like Big Abortion, Big Tobacco savaged its enemies in the scientific community. After scientist Oscar Auerbach published his "smoking dogs" studies, which reliably induced lung cancer in beagles, the Tobacco Institute initiated an advertising campaign to debunk the research. Tobacco executives also planned discussions with the Veterans Administration regarding cuts in the scientist's funding.
Mooney and other Big Abortion writers are fond of accusing their opponents of going against "mainstream science." In reality, Big Abortion and Big Tobacco hijacked mainstream science a half-century ago.
That's why scientists didn't debate the ABC link at the U.S. National Cancer Institute's workshop in 2003. Only one side of the issue - that abortion doesn't raise risk - was allowed to be presented. Some scientists attending the conference complained privately they feared losing government grants to conduct their research if they argued that abortion raises breast cancer risk.
Big Tobacco budgeted for the implementation of a $4.7 million proposal from public relations expert Rosser Reeves that involved commissioning books challenging the tobacco-cancer link. The books would be mailed to hundreds of thousands of physicians and scientists and advertised in journals and the mass media.
Reeves suggested an "editor education" program that would involve moonlighting editors from Time, Newsweek and other magazines. Reeves said these writers would write favorable articles about the books for Big Tobacco. He called them "janissaries" who will "depend on it for their livelihood and whose zeal, consequently, often runs well ahead of their facts."
Mooney is a writer for The American Prospect, which calls itself "an authoritative magazine of liberal ideas." His article on behalf of Big Abortion for the Washington Monthly appealed to emotions, not the intellect. He smeared Brind, Prentice, Reardon and McIlhaney on the basis of their Christian faith. Science isn't on Big Abortion's side, so Mooney took a "shoot the messenger" approach. He implied that religious belief disqualified their research because Christians aren't able to conduct scientific research objectively. Mooney wrote:
"You see, Brind may have received his biochemistry Ph.D. from New York University in 1981, but he passed a far more important personal milestone four years later when he found Jesus. Soon Brind recognized the 'noble task' God had chosen for him. He would prove the biological connection between having an abortion and contracting breast cancer later in life, thereby dissuading countless women from killing their unborn children."
A smear campaign is necessary since Mooney and his allies can't challenge, manipulate or refute the biological evidence and the rationale for an independent link between abortion and breast cancer.
Brind's religious faith is irrelevant to the scientific question of a link, but Mooney's intended message is that Professor Brind's determination of a cause-effect relationship is dependent on his faith, not on scientific evidence or reason. Mooney's uncharitable implication is that people of faith are incapable of exercising the ability to reason. It's a blatant attempt to exclude people of faith from scientific debate.
If scientists accepted Mooney's logic, then they'd have excluded the research of many luminaries including Pasteur, Keppler, Newton, Descartes, Mendel and Copernicus. They were scientists of deep religious conviction, and they demonstrated that faith isn't incompatible with the ability to conduct objective, groundbreaking scientific research.
One would have assumed that "government watchdogs" like Mooney and his editors at the Washington Monthly would have been strongly suspicious that a mountain of research has been published in internationally respected, peer-reviewed journals since 1957, but no one bothered to tell women about it. [5]
One might have thought they'd be deeply troubled that government scientists wrote to the British journal Lancet in 1986 acknowledging a causal relationship between abortion and the disease, but no one told women about it. [6]
One might have assumed that the rising breast cancer toll in the U.S. and Great Britain would at least be of mild concern for them. This should be especially true when government breast cancer statistics for both countries implicate abortion as the culprit. [7,8]
What would motivate a man like Mooney, who has no scientific credentials, to falsely assure women that abortion is safe when it's recognized that childbearing protects against breast cancer and there's no medical consensus on the question of an independent link between abortion and the disease? Men are at exceptionally low risk for developing breast cancer. Mooney will never suffer as a result of the long-term physical and psychological health consequences of abortion.
Women who develop the disease literally walk through hell during cancer treatment. Sometimes their battles for their lives can last for years. Some women lose their breasts. Others agonize over the impact of their illnesses and possible deaths on their children.
Mooney cited a single epidemiological study reporting "no overall effect on the risk of breast cancer" by Mads Melbye and his colleagues in 1997 to support his conclusion that abortion is unrelated to increased breast cancer risk. [9] He and his editors omitted a few inconvenient facts that aren't beneficial to Big Abortion. For instance, Melbye et al. found that risk increases 3% per week of gestation, and they detected a statistically significant 89% risk elevation for women choosing abortion after 18 weeks gestation.
What Mooney doesn't realize is that these findings helped a 17-year-old Pennsylvania girl, who had a second trimester abortion, win a settlement from her abortion doctor in the nation's first ABC medical malpractice lawsuit last year. [10]
One of Big Abortion's scientists is Dr. Lynn Rosenberg of Boston University. Mooney quoted her as saying that Melbye et al. was the "best study" that "settled the issue" of an ABC link. He didn't tell his readers that after Melbye et al. allegedly "settled the issue" seven years ago, scientists continued to spend taxpayer money studying the ABC link intensively.
Mooney didn't tell readers that Rosenberg was an expert witness for Big Abortion's law firm - the Center for Reproductive Rights. She was forced to admit under oath in a Florida case that a 15 year old pregnant girl has a higher breast cancer risk if she chooses to abort her pregnancy than if she carries the pregnancy to term. [11]
The risks of abortion were identified in a CME (continuing medical education) article in the medical journal, Obstetrical and Gynecological Survey, by John Thorp, Jr. and his colleagues. [12] The authors reviewed scientific research demonstrating that these risks include placenta previa, breast cancer, pre-term birth, depression, suicide and substance abuse.
Thorp and his colleagues discussed the recognized breast cancer risk of abortion. They wrote, "We think, now, that clinicians are obliged to inform pregnant women that a decision to abort her first pregnancy may almost double her lifetime risk of breast cancer through loss of the protective effect of a completed first full-term pregnancy earlier in life."
The recommendation came 33 years too late - after a mounting death toll and the publication of the landmark study by Harvard researchers finding that an early first full term pregnancy provides a significant reduction in risk. [13]
Big Tobacco's writers used to accuse its opponents of using "scare tactics." They uncharitably labeled their opponents "intolerant prohibitionists" consisting of "a joyless tribe...who want to manage everyone else's lives."
Similarly, Mooney and his editors labeled industry opponents as the "religious right.," and the politicians who listen to Christian scientists as "dupes." Other writers have labeled the ABC link a "scare tactic."
Most men care more about the women in their lives than keeping abortion accessible. On the other hand, abortion is really more of a macho Playboy right than a surgical procedure that benefits women. After all, it serves those men who are unwilling to make commitments to the women in their lives.
ACTION ITEM: E-mail Chris Mooney and the Washington Monthly's editors and ask them why they don't care about women's health.
Chris Mooney
moonecc@yahoo.com
Washington Monthly
editors@washingtonmonthly.com
References:
1. See http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2004/0410.mooney.html
2. Brind J, Chinchilli, VM, Severs WB, Summy-Long J. Induced abortion as an independent risk factor for breast cancer: a comprehensive review and meta-analysis. J Epidemiol Community Health 1996;50:481-496.
3. Kessler D. Question of Intent: a Great American Battle with a Deadly Industry. 1st ed. New York, NY: Public Affairs; 2001.
4. Kluger R. Ashes to Ashes: America's Hundred-Year Cigarette War, the Public Health, and the Unabashed Triumph of Philip Morris. New York, Alfred A. Knopf; 1996.
5. Segi M, Fukushima I, Fujisaku S, Kurihara M, Saito S, Asano K, Kamoi M. An epidemiological study on cancer in Japan. GANN 1957;48(Suppl):1-63.
6. Stadel BV, Rubin GL, Wingo PA, Schlesselman JJ. Letter. Oral contraceptives and breast cancer in young women. Lancet 1986;ii:436.
7. Howe HL, Wingo PA, Thun MJ, Ries LA, Rosenberg HM, Feigal EG, Edwards BK. Annual report to the nation on the status of cancer, 1973 through 1998, featuring cancers with recent increasing trends. J Natl Cancer Inst 2001;93:824-842.
8. Carroll P. Trends and Risk Factors in English Breast Cancer. British Journal of Cancer 2004;91 (Suppl. 1):S24 (abstract). Carroll's text and graphs available online at: www.AbortionBreastCancer.com.
9. Melbye M, Wohlfahrt J, Olson JH, Frisch M, Westergaard T, Helweg-Larsen K, Andersen PK. Induced abortion and the risk of breast cancer. N Engl J Med 1997;336:81-85.
10. Lynne, Diana. "Abortion doctor caves in lawsuit: Settlement given to patient for not warning about breast cancer risk," World Net Daily, October 23, 2003.
11. Rosenberg (1999) NE FL Women's Health v. State of FL, FL Circuit Ct, 2nd circ., videoteape deposition of 11/18/99, pp. 77-8.
12. Thorp JM, Hartmann KE, Shadigian EM. Long-term physical and psychological health consequences of induced abortion: A review of the evidence. Obstet & Gynecol Survey 2003;58:1.
13. MacMahon, B, Cole P, Lin TM, Lowe CR, Mirra AP, Ravnihar B, Salber EJ, Valaoras VG, Yuasa S. Age at First Birth and Breast Cancer Risk. Bull WHO 1970;43:209-221.
The Coalition on Abortion/Breast Cancer is an international women's organization founded to protect the health and save the lives of women by educating and providing information on abortion as a risk factor for breast cancer.
Tax-deductible, credit card donations can be made at
www.AbortionBreastCancer.com. Donations can be mailed to: the Coalition on Abortion/Breast Cancer, P.O. Box 957133, Hoffman Estates, IL 60195. The IRS recognizes the coalition as a 501(c)3 organization.
FOR FURTHER INFORMATION:
Women's Injury Network
www.womensinjurynetwork.org
Breast Cancer Prevention Institute
www.BCPInstitute.org
Polycarp Research Institute
www.polycarp.org
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