by Simon Caldwell, TCW
JUST over 20 years ago an American scientist called Joel Brind visited London in the hope that his findings of a causal link between abortion and breast cancer (ABC) would get a better hearing than in his native New York.
Few of his peers at home were interested in the results of a meta-analysis he and his team at Baruch College, City University of New York, had conducted into the alleged link using all the available international evidence. They didn’t care that Brind et al were able to demonstrate that a woman had a 30 per cent increased chance of developing breast cancer in later life if she underwent an abortion before giving birth to her first child, or that childbirth before the age of 35 protects women from developing the disease. Such truths were inconvenient.
Brind’s pioneering work was ignored when it should have been acclaimed. He had not only crunched the numbers but, as a Professor of Human Biology and Endocrinology, he had offered an explanation. Breast cancer, he found, was in many cases caused by high levels of oestradiol, a hormone which stimulates breast growth during pregnancy. The effects of oestradiol are minimised naturally in women who take their pregnancy to full term but it remains at dangerously high levels in those who abort. Most women who miscarry, rather than abort, have characteristically low levels of oestradiol in their bodies so they are not affected in the same way.
Brind’s findings are alarming in the light of an 80 per cent increase in the rate of breast cancer in the UK since 1971, a period in which the number of annual abortions has risen from 18,000 to well over 200,000. Had he uncovered a health risk as dangerous as, say, tobacco?