The study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) looked at data from 1973 to 2009 and found that the incidence of “distant disease” – which means breast cancer that spread to the bones, brain, lungs or elsewhere – increased from 1.53 women per 100,000 in 1976 to 2.90 in 2009. The increase doesn’t seem that startling by itself, but take into account that there are 62 million women of child-bearing age in the U.S. and the math becomes hard to ignore.
What could be behind this increase in breast cancer for young women? What changed in 1973 that might be a contributing factor?
In 1972, in Eisenstadt vs. Baird, the U.S. Supreme Court made it legal for unmarried people to use contraceptives. The birth control pill already had been on the market for over a decade, and its use among young women began to grow exponentially. More than 12 million women in the U.S. currently swallow the Pill to prevent pregnancy, cure acne, relieve menstrual cramps and for a host of other reasons.
In 1999 oral contraceptives were identified as Class 1 carcinogens by the International Agency for Research on Cancer, an arm of the World Health Organization. Following a 2005 review, the designation did not change. Therefore, young women who have been taking the Pill for years, even decades, have been ingesting a cancer-causing agent every day. Might this be a factor in the spike in breast cancer diagnoses?
A year later, the Supreme Court made abortion in the United States legal throughout pregnancy. Today and every day, more than 3,000 women in the United States will end their pregnancies through abortion and the vast majority belongs to the demographic group identified in the JAMA study.
It was long ago accepted as gospel truth that abortion has no link to breast cancer. That “fact” is repeated in the mainstream media over and over, as if it’s indisputable and without controversy. The reason has nothing to do with health and everything to do with the fact that in this country, no one dare speak ill of abortion.
But some breast surgeons are willing to speak the truth about the abortion breast cancer link and the Pill’s influence on breast cancer rates. In both cases, it’s all about the estrogen. An increased exposure to estrogen increases breast cancer risk, and no one disputes that. But according to Dr. Angela Lanfranchi, a breast cancer surgeon in practice since 1984, government health organizations and the mainstream media somehow manage to overlook 70 studies about induced abortion and breast cancer performed all over the world. Fifty-five of these studies show a positive correlation between abortion and breast cancer, and of those, 33 show a statistically significant increase in breast cancer risk. (Go to www.bcpinstitute.org to learn more). Dr. Lanfranchi points out that many of the studies were performed in countries where abortion is part of public policy and information on it is readily available. In the United States, any attempt to collect information on abortion becomes a political and ideological battle. Currently, states submit abortion data voluntarily. California, the state with the most abortions, keeps its information to itself.
The new JAMA study showing dramatic increases in the deadliest cancers has to be a wake-up call to the American medical establishment. We can no longer bury our heads in the sand to avoid seeing the links between abortion, hormonal contraception and breast cancer. Women’s lives are at stake.