Dear Friends:

The late Sir Richard Doll, a scientist from Oxford University who was best known for having cited tobacco as the "major cause" of lung cancer, received corporate consulting fees from the chemical industry.

He also participated in the cover-up of the abortion-breast cancer link.  It makes you wonder whether he had any other undisclosed conflicts of interest, such as consulting work for the abortion industry.

Sincerely,
Karen Malec
Coalition on Abortion/Breast Cancer

ABORTION-BREAST CANCER NEWS HEADLINES

"Monsanto's Paid Scientist Richard Doll Participated in Abortion-Cancer Cover-Up"

The term, "Oxford University Cover-Up," has taken on a new dimension.  The Coalition on Abortion/Breast Cancer originally employed the term in an October press release to describe five, seriously flawed studies authored by researchers at the U.K.'s Oxford University - studies that have been widely used to erase the abortion breast cancer link from the public mind. [1,2,3,4,5,6] 

The late Sir Richard Doll, Oxford's esteemed lung cancer researcher, participated in the Oxford Cover-Up by signing on as a co-author in two of the five abortion-cancer studies. [2,4]  Doll is best remembered for having demonstrated a connection between cigarette smoking and lung cancer in 1950 and for having fingered the tobacco habit as "a major cause" of lung cancer.

Last week, the British press implicated Doll as a paid consultant for U.S. and British chemical corporations. [8,9] It is not considered unethical for a scientist to act as an industry consultant, but he (or she) is ethically obligated to disclose any conflicts of interest.

The Guardian, reported that Doll received a daily consultant's fee of $1,500 from Monsanto Corporation during the 1980s when he was investigating its product, Agent Orange, as a possible cancer-causing agent.  While he was a Monsanto consultant, Doll wrote to an Australian Royal commission and denied the existence of evidence linking Agent Orange with cancer.

The Guardian reported that Doll also accepted consulting fees from Dow Chemical Corporation, the Chemical Manufacturers Association and ICI for his work on a scientific review that exonerated vinyl chloride as a cancer-causing substance (except for a link to liver cancer).

Doll's colleague, Sir Richard Peto, told the British Broadcasting Corporation that he and Doll decided to give any corporate consulting fees they might receive to charities.  According to Peto, Doll gave funds to Green College where he was the presidential "Warden."

Professor Joel Brind, president of the Breast Cancer Prevention Institute, agrees with Doll's assessment of the impact of industrial pollutants.  He said, "Doll was essentially right in that the role of industrial pollutants has been generally overstated in terms of the total cancer burden."

On the other hand, Doll has also conducted research on the link between oral contraceptives (OCs) and breast cancer.  He and his colleagues initially failed to find a connection to the disease, but this can be attributed to the fact that most of their study subjects had used OCs after a first full term pregnancy (FFTP).  Breast tissue does not mature from cancer-vulnerable tissue into cancer-resistant tissue until the last eight weeks of a full term pregnancy. 

A link to breast cancer surfaced only when Doll's Oxford team later studied women in 1987 who had previously used OCs before a FFTP.  This is significant because female breast tissue before FFTP overwhelmingly consists of cancer-vulnerable Type 1 and 2 lobules.  Up to 95% of all breast cancers originate in these lobules. 

Doll's scientists found that OC users before a FFTP increased their risk of developing the disease by 2.6 times, but they soft-pedaled their findings.  They said, "Since this result is at variance with the findings in some other studies we have investigated the nature of this association with particular emphasis on possible bias, pill type and a latent effect." [10]

Cancer authorities, however, dragged their feet on recognition of the OC-breast cancer link.  It was not until 2005 that the World Health Organization classified combined oral contraceptives as a Group 1 carcinogen. [11,12]  (Combined OCs contain the same drugs as combined hormone replacement therapy - estrogen and progestin.  Only the dose is higher in OCs).  Professor Brind opined:

"So what we have here is a case where the lead mainstream epidemiologists actually publish the bad news, but downplay it, so that the public health and medical authorities keep calling it all 'safe.' Note how, in the case of OCs and breast and liver cancer risk, it has taken fully 20 years for the WHO to begin making the public aware of these links publicly reported by Doll et al. in 1986-87."

News of Doll's work as a paid consultant for the chemical industry makes a person wonder whether he had any other undisclosed conflicts of interest, such as consulting work for the abortion industry. 

Oxford scientists launched their cover-up of the ABC link with the publication of the study, Vessey et al 1982. [4]  Doll's name appears as a co-author for that paper.  It was published a year after the first U.S. study on the abortion-breast cancer (ABC) link, Pike et al. 1981, reported a 140% increase in risk for women who had abortions.  Vessey, Doll and their colleagues wrote that:

"A recent publication from California in this journal has suggested that both prolonged oral contraceptive use and abortion before first term pregnancy increase the risk of breast cancer in young women.  Data are presented on 1176 women aged 16-50 years with breast cancer, interviewed in London or in Oxford, together with a like number of matched control subjects.  The results are entirely reassuring, being, in fact more compatible with protective effects than the reverse."

In 1982, the Oxford scientists were saying, in effect, "Ladies, you don't have to worry about an abortion-breast cancer link because abortion REDUCES your risk for breast cancer."

There was just one sticky point.  The Oxford study, Vessey et al. 1982, cannot be considered a serious examination of the ABC link because, according to the authors, "Only a handful of women stated that they had had a termination before their first term pregnancy...."

Both Doll and Peto appear as co-authors in the British journal Lancet's scientific review, Beral et al. 2004 - one of five papers included in the Oxford Cover-Up. [2]  They inaccurately represented their paper as a "collaborative" review of 53 studies (there were actually 52) examining the ABC link.

The paper has been very useful in the abortion industry's propaganda war against the link.  In general, the media (perhaps unwittingly) misrepresented the scientists' findings.   They left their readers with the impression that scientists had concluded that abortion is unrelated to an increase in the number of breast cancer cases. 

It is a falsehood because even Doll's Oxford scientists acknowledged in their paper (and in an earlier review, Beral et al. 2002) that childbearing protects women from the disease. In the 2002 paper, their group concluded that increased childbearing and breastfeeding would cut breast cancer rates by over one-half in developed nations. [7] (Such a feat cannot be accomplished in cultures where abortion is prevalent.) 

In the 2004 paper, they confirmed that, "Pregnancies that result in a birth are known to reduce a woman's long-term risk of developing breast cancer...."

Therefore, there was no question in their minds that the woman who has a baby has a lower breast cancer  risk in comparison to the woman who has an abortion. As stated before, the biological reason for this phenomenon is that the breasts do not mature into cancer-resistant tissue until the last eight weeks of a full term pregnancy.  An abortion cannot bring about this transformation in the breast tissue.

One of the problems with the 2004 paper is that the Oxford scientists weren't intellectually honest enough to publicly admit that abortion has anything at all to do with the loss of the protective effect of childbearing.  Even worse, they omitted this effect when they calculated the relative risk.  Therefore, they failed to calculate the total breast cancer risk associated with abortion, and the general public had no clue that they had underestimated the risk. 

The protective effect of a full term pregnancy has already been well established in the medical literature.  The Oxford scientists narrowed the focus of their 2004 paper to a second breast cancer risk known as the "independent link."  It is the only remaining cancer risk of abortion that scientists ever debate.  An independent link would mean that abortion leaves women with an increased number of cancer-vulnerable Type 1 and 2 breast lobules. 

Even the Oxford researchers admitted that the scope of their 2004 paper was limited to a purely hypothetical situation.  They said that they were "comparing the effects of having had a pregnancy that ended as an abortion with those of never having had that pregnancy."

The Oxford team used highly unorthodox methods.  For instance, the team used unscientific reasons to justify the omission of 15 published, peer-reviewed studies from the review.  These 15 studies reported a moderate to strong association between abortion and increased breast cancer risk - an average risk increase of 80%. By eliminating the 15 studies from their review, the Oxford scientists made it look as if the only studies that demonstrated a positive association showed a weak one of no more than a 41% risk increase.  [13]

Furthermore, Doll's scientists used the red herring - a theoretical argument called "recall bias" - to explain away the differences in the findings between the retrospective studies and the prospective studies.  Retrospective studies rely on women to report their abortion histories. Prospective studies rely on medical records for this information.

Recall bias has been repeatedly disproved [15], but ideological opponents of the link use it nonetheless.

They suggest that the studies that rely on women's interviews are reporting artificial results. (It just so happens that the vast majority of the retrospective studies and one prospective study report risk increases for post abortive women.) 

Opponents argue that the retrospective studies report a risk increase, not because there really is an ABC link, but because more sick women tell the truth about their abortion histories than do healthy women. 

Doll's scientists argued that the retrospective research should be disregarded for these reasons and that only the findings from the prospective research should be considered. They had excluded from their review the prospective study, Howe et al. 1990, which reported a statistically significant 90% risk increase for New York women who had abortions. [23]

However, ten prospective studies that abortion enthusiasts favor have been criticized for having inadequate follow-up times and for comparing young women with recent abortions to older breast cancer patients who were too old to have been exposed to legal abortions during most of their fertile years. [14]

Six experts have criticized the flaws in the Oxford review paper, Beral et al. 2004, and they did so independently of one another and in seven different publications. [14,16,17,18,19,20,21, 22]  Two of those experts, Chris Kahlenborn, MD and Patrick Carroll of the Pensions and Population Research Institute sent letters to the journal Lancet that were critical of the flawed Oxford paper.  Although they were experts who had previously published research on the ABC link, the Lancet inexplicably refused to publish their letters. [22] 

This is how the "debate" on the ABC link unfolds in a scientific world that has been so thoroughly corrupted by abortion.  If science isn't on your side, it's always best to resort to censorship and to accuse your opponents of being "pro-life."

References:

1. Press Release,"Oxford Study Denying Abortion-Cancer Link 'Seriously Flawed in the Direction of Covering Up the Link,'" Coalition on Abortion/Breast Cancer, October 18, 2006.  Available at:
<http://www.abortionbreastcancer.com/press_releases/061018/index.htm>.

2. 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.

3. Reeves G , Kan S, Key T, Tjønneland A, Olsen A, et al. Breast cancer risk in relation to abortion: Results from the EPIC study. International Journal of Cancer 2006;119;7: 1741 - 1745.

4. Vessey M, et al. Oral contraceptive use and abortion before first term pregnancy in relation to breast cancer risk. Br J Cancer 1982;45:327.

5. Brewster D, Stockton D, Dobbie R, Bull D, Beral D. Risk of breast cancer after miscarriage or induced abortion: a Scottish record linkage case-control study. Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health 2005;59:283-287.

6. Goldacre MJ, Kurina LM, Seagroatt V, Yeates. Abortion and breast cancer: a case-control record linkage study. J Epidemiol Community Health 2001;55:336-337.

7. 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.

8. British Broadcasting Corporation website.  Click on the Friday, December 8, 2006 interview with Richard Peto.  Available at:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/today/listenagain/

9. Sarah Boseley, "Renowned cancer scientist was paid by chemical firm for 20 years," The Guardian, December 8, 2006. Available at:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/frontpage/story/0,,1967385,00.html

10. McPherson K, et al. Early oral contraceptive use and breast cancer: Results of another case control study.  Br J Cancer 1987;56:653-660.

11. Cogliano V, Grosse Y, Baan R, Secretan B, El Ghissassi F. Carcinogenicity of combined oestrogen-progestagen contraceptives and menopausal treatment. Lancet Oncology 2005;6:552-553.

12. Press Release No. 167, "IARC Monographs Programme Finds Combined Estrogen-Progestogen Contraceptives (the "pill") and Menopausal Therapy Are Carcinogenic to Humans," World Health Organization International Agency for Research on Cancer, July 29, 2005. See
<http://www.iarc.fr/ENG/Press_Releases/pr167a.html>.

13. See the Breast Cancer Prevention Institute's fact sheet discussing the Lancet review article, Beral et al. 2004.  Available at:
http://www.bcpinstitute.org/beralpaperanalysis.htm

14. Brind J. Induced abortion as an independent risk factor for breast cancer: A critical review of recent studies based on prospective data. J Am Phys Surg Vol. 10, No. 4 (Winter 2005) 105-110. Available at:
<http://www.jpands.org/vol10no4/brind.pdf>.

15. For a further discussion of research on recall bias, see the Coalition on Abortion/Breast Cancer's web page,
http://www.abortionbreastcancer.com/recall_bias/index.htm#WHAT%20IS%20RECALL%20BIAS?

16. Lanfranchi A. The abortion-breast cancer link revisited. Ethics and Medics (November 2004) Vol. 29, No. 11, p. 1-4.  Available at:
http://www.abortionbreastcancer.com/news/041120/index.htm

17. Furton E. Editorial. The corruption of science by ideology. Ethics and Medics (Dec. 2004) Vol. 29, No. 11, p. 1-2.  Available at:
http://www.abortionbreastcancer.com/E+MDec2004-EFurtonarticle.PDF

18. Schlafly A. Legal implications of a link between abortion and breast cancer. J Am Phys Surgeons 2005;10:11-14. Available at:
http://www.jpands.org/vol10no1/aschlafly.pdf

19. Brind J. The abortion-breast cancer connection. National Catholic Bioethics Quarterly Summer 2005; p. 303-329.
<http://www.AbortionBreastCancer.com/Brind_NCBQ.PDF>.

20. Lanfranchi A. The breast physiology and the epidemiology of the abortion breast cancer link. Imago Hominis 2005;12(3): 228-236.
<http://www.abortionbreastcancer.com/Lanfranchi060201.pdf>

21. Lanfranchi A. The science, studies and sociology of the abortion-breast cancer link. Research Bulletin 2005;18:1-8. Available at:
http://www.abortionbreastcancer.com/June2005.pdf

22. See the Coalition on Abortion/Breast Cancer's press release, "Medical Journals Censoring Scientific Debate on Abortion-Breast Cancer Link, Says Women's Group," August 17, 2004.  Available at:
http://www.abortionbreastcancer.com/press_releases/040817/index.htm

23. Howe HL, Senie RT, Bzduch H, Herzfeld P. Early abortion and breast cancer risk among women under age 40. Int J Epidemiol 1989;18:300-304.

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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 http://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
http://www.AbortionBreastCancer.com

Breast Cancer Prevention Institute
http://www.BCPInstitute.org

Polycarp Research Institute
http://www.polycarp.org