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Nuremberg Style Medical Ethics and Informed Consent Legislation
By Karen Malec, president, Coalition on Abortion/Breast Cancer
May 9, 2005
A report last week in the Kaiser Daily Reproductive Health Report revealed that a panel of five obstetrician/gynecologists - whose job is to determine what information to include on Alaska's informed consent website - will include information about fetal pain and a "possible" abortion-breast cancer link.
Two doctors are professed abortion-supporters. At least one of them performs abortions and, therefore, stands to profit from a watered-down statement concerning the risk.
According to the report, the panel will inform women that experts disagree about the link. Sources that recognize a link will be identified on the website. Although doctors at the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) have a monetary interest in abortion and the ABC link poses a serious threat to their industry, the website will reveal that ACOG finds the evidence "inconsistent and difficult to interpret."
The statement will inaccurately state that recent studies showed no link. This shows how misinformed the panel's doctors are about a "review" article published last year in the British journal Lancet. [1] The Lancet's findings were clarified and criticized in the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons last month. [2] The author said, "The Lancet data and article are consistent with the prevailing medical view that the more abortions in a society, the greater the number of breast cancer cases."
Unfortunately, the Lancet article has been widely misunderstood and used in news reports to disabuse women of the notion that abortion is related to increased breast cancer risk. Perhaps some individuals don't realize there are two breast cancer risks associated with induced abortion. One is debated, the other isn't.
The scope of the Lancet investigation was limited to the debated risk. Lancet researchers examined only a hypothetical comparison between the effect of having an abortion and the effect of not having had that pregnancy.
An honest investigation of the ABC link would have included a comparison between the effects of having an abortion and having a full term pregnancy - the only realistic choices for any pregnant woman.
Even the Lancet's authors agree that a full term pregnancy protects against breast cancer, but the hypothetical comparison served the authors' intended purpose. [3] It artificially decreased the relative risk.
Legislators in Georgia and New Hampshire voted recently to deny women their right to know about the ABC risk. Officials in Alabama and Louisiana also decided in recent months to keep women uninformed.
Lawmakers and state health officials need to wake up to the Nuremberg-style medical ethics that are rampant in this field of research. The lives of an increasing number of teenagers and young women will be cut short because of greed and ideological bias. All of society will pay the price for the emotional devastation and financial costs that will peak once the bulk of the Roe v. Wade generation reaches the age when most breast cancers are diagnosed - age 50 and older.
Anyone with average intelligence can recognize that cancer fundraising industry officials are lying to women. Cancer fundraising businesses acknowledge a fact known since the 17th Century on their websites - that childbearing protects women from breast cancer. The websites reveal that early first full term pregnancy, breastfeeding and increased childbearing reduce risk.
However, the "A" word is a problem for the cancer fundraising industry's feminists and the scientists who depend on grants from that industry. They refuse to acknowledge that abortion causes women to lose the protective effect of childbearing. Yet, it's irrefutable that, if childbearing protects women, then nations with high abortion rates will experience more cases of breast cancer. That, in turn, spurs more cancer walkers to raise funds for cancer fundraising businesses.
The loss of the protective effect of childbearing is the first of two breast cancer risks associated with abortion. The cancer establishment's failure to warn our precious adolescents and young women about a recognized, deadly risk is reminiscent of the Nazi holocaust, the Tuskegee scandal, and Big Tobacco's cover-up of the tobacco-cancer link.
A society that doesn't care enough about its own sisters, wives and daughters to stop this atrocity has no future. Is abortion ideology so vitally important that we're willing to sacrifice their lives for it?
On April 15, 2005 I testified about the abortion-breast cancer (ABC) link by telephone conference during a hearing held in Anchorage before the panel of five physicians.
I told doctors they're the ones incurring additional medical malpractice insurance costs because of the ABC link. Whether they perform abortions or not, they're the ones suffering from the financial costs of breast cancer, not the criminal scientists who now lead the U.S. National Cancer Institute (NCI). Ultimately, medical malpractice costs are passed on to all of society.
Two U.S. abortion doctors were successfully sued for malpractice because they didn't disclose the breast cancer risk and the risk of emotional damage. The Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons reported in March that failure to diagnose breast cancer (or failure to diagnose it early) is the greatest cause of malpractice lawsuits in the U.S. today. [2] Therefore, even doctors who don't perform abortions are paying for the cost of abortion.
Doctors are being sued, in part, because they aren't adequately screening for breast cancer. Many fail to ask women to reveal their abortion histories on patient intake forms. Doctors are busy with patients and don't have time to review a mountain of research that has accumulated over the last half-century. They rely on the "bottom line" from the criminal NCI. It is their misfortune. If doctors don't find an ABC link, then the nation's lawyers will gladly do it for them.
During the hearing in Alaska, I testified that only one scientist has explained why the Roe v. Wade generation suffered a more than 40% increase in breast cancer rates between the mid-1980's and 1998 - our medical adviser, Joel Brind, Ph.D., president of the Breast Cancer Prevention Institute. [4] The two older generations didn't experience that increase and didn't have access to legalized abortion. [5,6]
Angela Lanfranchi, associate professor of surgery at the Robert Wood Johnson Medical Center, also testified by telephone conference. She explained the biological rationale for the ABC link.
Two women who'd had abortions gave moving testimonies. They are Eve Sanchez Silver and Denise Mountenay. Silver's brother, Pablo Sanchez, testified about how devastated he was to learn that his girlfriend had aborted his son in 1976. After his testimony, there was a long period of silence in the room where the hearing was held. Even the most hardened hearts were moved by his devastating experience.
Silver is a two-time breast cancer survivor, a medical research analyst and a former Latina adviser to the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation (SGK). She resigned from SGK after learning about the ABC link and SGK's gifts to Planned Parenthood from a press release distributed by our organization.
Silver and Mountenay each had their abortions before their first full term pregnancies. The most carcinogenic time in a woman's life takes place between the onset of her menstrual periods and her first full term pregnancy. That's the time when she has cancer-vulnerable Types 1 and 2 breast lobules - TDLU's (terminal ductal lobular units). Scientists recognize that cancers develop in TDLU's. These lobules only mature into cancer-resistant tissue during the third trimester of pregnancy. [7-16]
The worst time in a woman's life to take the pill or to have an abortion is before a first full term pregnancy. Silver's doctor "added fuel to the fire" by prescribing the birth control pill. The pill contains steroidal estrogens, which are on the nation's list of "known carcinogens." Steroidal estrogens are used in hormone replacement therapy, a recognized risk factor for breast cancer. [9]
Silver could not have known at the time of her abortions that a family history of breast cancer was in her future. Her first cousin, grandmother and mother had the disease. Research by Janet Daling and her colleagues in 1994 showed that women with a family history of the disease and who have abortions before age 18 have an incalculably high breast cancer risk. [17]
Abortion industry activists are using the NCI's false information concerning the link to disinform state legislators and undermine efforts to pass informed consent legislation.
In early 2003, the NCI engineered a Soviet-like political charade to keep the masses from learning about a half-century of secret research showing that abortion is responsible for the increased incidence of breast cancer in the U.S. and other developed nations.
Under the leadership of Andrew Von Eschenbach, NCI scientists conducted a sham workshop entitled "Early Reproductive Events and Breast Cancer." The stated purpose was to discuss and evaluate the ABC research. However, there was no discussion of the merits or demerits of the research.
Yet, one month before the workshop, an article appeared in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute entitled "Estrogen and DNA Damage: The Silent Source of Breast Cancer?" Its author, Katherine Miller, quoted NCI expert David Longfellow, Ph.D., chief of the Chemical and Physical Carcinogenesis Branch at the NCI. He said, "It has been an uphill battle to convince the mainstream that estrogen initiates cancer by damaging DNA." [10]
Women are overexposed to more estrogen during a normal pregnancy (not during most miscarriages) than at any other time in their lives. If a woman aborts her pregnancy, then she misses a crucial maturation process that protects her from estrogen overexposure and shapes her breast lobules into cancer-resistant Types 3 and 4 lobules.
Scientists knew of the dangers of estrogen as early as 1988. [12] They did nothing to warn women about the risks of taking hormone replacement therapy and oral contraceptives until 2002.
Von Eschenbach and his subordinates know far more about the ABC link than what they're willing to tell women. They couldn't care less about women like Denise Mountenay and Eve Sanchez Silver. They don't care if women are disfigured and lose their breasts and hair. They don't care if children lose their mothers to the disease. Their ethics are no better than those of Joseph Mengele, the Nazi physician who conducted monstrous experiments on concentration camp victims during World War II. Why do Von Eschenbach and his scientists hate women so much?
My testimony and those given by Joel Brind, Ph.D., Denise Mountenay, Pablo Sanchez and Eve Sanchez Silver are shown below.
Karen Malec:
http://www.abortionbreastcancer.com/testimony/malec
Joel Brind, Ph.D.
http://www.abortionbreastcancer.com/testimony/brind
Denise Mountenay
http://www.abortionbreastcancer.com/testimony/mountenay
Eve Sanchez Silver
http://www.abortionbreastcancer.com/testimony/sanchez_silver
Pablo Sanchez
http://www.abortionbreastcancer.com/testimony/sanchez
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References:
1. Beral V, Bull D, Doll R, Peto R, Reeves G. Collaborative Group of Hormonal Factors in Breast Cancer. Breast cancer and abortion: collaborative reanalysis of data from 53 epidemiological studies, including 83,000 women with breast cancer from 16 countries. Lancet 2004;363:1007-16.
2. Schlafly A. Legal implications of a link between abortion and breast cancer. Jrnl of American Physicians and Surgeons Vol. 10, No. 1, Spring 2005.
3. Beral V, et al. Breast cancer and breastfeeding: collaborative re-analysis of individual data from 47 epidemiological studies in 30 countries, including 50,302 women with breast cancer and 96,973 women without the disease. Lancet 2002;360:187-195.
4. 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.
5. 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.
6. Malec K. The abortion-breast cancer link: how politics trumped science and informed consent. J Am Phys Surgeons 2003;8:41-45.
7. Bernstein L, Ross R. Endogenous hormones and breast cancer risk. Epidemiol Rev 1993;15:48-62.
8. Liehr JG. Is estradiol a genotoxic mutagenic carcinogen? Endocrine Rev 2000;21(1):40-54.
9. Writing group for the Women's Health Initiative Investigators. Risks and benefits of estrogen plus progestin in healthy postmenopausal women. JAMA 2002;288:321-33.
10. Miller K. Estrogen and DNA damage: The silent source of breast cancer? J Natl Cancer Inst 2003;95:100-2.
11. Potten CS, Watson RJ, Williams CT, et al. The effect of age and menstrual cycle upon proliferative activity of the normal human breast. Br J Cancer 1988;58:163-168.
12. Henderson BE, Ross R, Bernstein L. Estrogen is a cause of human cancer: The Richard and Hilda Rosenthal Foundation Award Lecture. Cancer Res 1988;48:246-53.
13. Russo J, Reina D, Frederick J, et al. Expression of phenotypical changes by human breast epithelial cells treated with carcinogens in vitro. Cancer Res 1988;48:2837-2857.
14. Russo J, Rivera R, Russo IH. Influence of Age and Parity on the Development of the Human Breast. Breast Cancer Research and Treatment 1992;23:211-218.
15. Russo J, Russo IH. Toward a physiological approach to breast cancer prevention. Cancer Epidemiol, Biomarkers Prev 1994;3:353-364.
16. Russo J, Yun-Fu Hu Xiaoqi Yang, Russo I. Chapter 1. Developmental Cellular and Molecular Basis of Human Breast Cancer. J Natl Cancer Inst Monogr 2000; 27:17-37.
17. Daling JR, Malone DE, Voigt LF, White E, Weiss NS. Risk of breast cancer among young women: relationship to induced abortion. J Natl Cancer Inst 1994;86:1584-1592. White E, Malone KE, Weiss NS, Daling JR. Breast cancer among young US women in relation to oral contraceptive use. J Natl Cancer Inst 1994;86:505-514.
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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:
Coalition on Abortion/Breast Cancer
www.AbortionBreastCancer.com
Breast Cancer Prevention Institute
www.BCPInstitute.org
Polycarp Research Institute
www.polycarp.org
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