National Right to Life
Naomi Elster, described as a scientist and a volunteer for the Abortion Rights Campaign, says, “It’s time to talk about the pseudoscience corrupting the abortion debate.” (The ARC is an Irish coalition organized to make abortion legal on demand in Ireland.)
I couldn’t agree more. The real question is, of course, who’s peddling the pseudoscience?
Elster certainly claims that major authorities—specifically naming the WHO—are on her side, i.e., “that having an abortion does not increase breast cancer risk.” Plus, she cites her own “background in breast cancer research.”
So for those who have a genuine interest in getting beyond the perennial credentials battle to actually know the truth, I guess I’ll just have to double down on appealing to common sense, including the common sense of biology.
To be clear the only actual scientific evidence Elster cites is “a huge analysis of more than 50 separate research studies with a total of 83,000 breast cancer patients and survivors” (that) found “no evidence” of an abortion-breast cancer link.
I could go on at considerable length to critique this fatally flawed “collaborative reanalysis” by Valerie Beral et al. (as I have done many times before, including in NRL News Today). But when most people see or hear that it was done by researchers at Oxford University and published in the Lancet (one of the premier medical journals in the world), they stop reading or listening (or thinking). It MUST be true.
So I’ll just stick to facts that are absolutely not in dispute and challenge the reader to use common sense and reason.
I couldn’t agree more. The real question is, of course, who’s peddling the pseudoscience?
Elster certainly claims that major authorities—specifically naming the WHO—are on her side, i.e., “that having an abortion does not increase breast cancer risk.” Plus, she cites her own “background in breast cancer research.”
So for those who have a genuine interest in getting beyond the perennial credentials battle to actually know the truth, I guess I’ll just have to double down on appealing to common sense, including the common sense of biology.
To be clear the only actual scientific evidence Elster cites is “a huge analysis of more than 50 separate research studies with a total of 83,000 breast cancer patients and survivors” (that) found “no evidence” of an abortion-breast cancer link.
I could go on at considerable length to critique this fatally flawed “collaborative reanalysis” by Valerie Beral et al. (as I have done many times before, including in NRL News Today). But when most people see or hear that it was done by researchers at Oxford University and published in the Lancet (one of the premier medical journals in the world), they stop reading or listening (or thinking). It MUST be true.
So I’ll just stick to facts that are absolutely not in dispute and challenge the reader to use common sense and reason.
To begin with, this study Elster cites was published in 2004–13 years ago! Time has not stood still. Millions of abortions have been performed since that time (as well as decades before), and millions of cases of breast cancer cases have been diagnosed worldwide since then as well.
Therefore I must ask if those on my side, who insist that there is a link between having an induced abortion and increasing the risk of having breast cancer–the ABC link–should we then not be witnessing a worldwide explosion in breast cancer incidence since 2004?
Would this not be especially evident in places where abortion has skyrocketed, such as China and South Asia over the last few decades? (Remember breast cancer often takes 20 years to show up following an event that may trigger it, such as abortion.)National Right to Life continues
