It has been a staple of pro-life ad campaigns and even state law: that abortion raises the risk of *** cancer and that a woman who is considering terminating a pregnancy be told that. At least three states have such "right to know" laws on their books, according to the count kept by Planned Parenthood. The abortion-*** cancer link has also been prime example wielded by those who charge that the Bush administration has politicized science. For instance, the Web site of the National Cancer Institute had long stated that the best studies show "no association between abortion and *** cancer" but, when anti-abortion congressmen objected to that, NCI revised its Web site to call the evidence inconclusive. That was in November 2002. The new fact sheet said, "Some studies have reported statistically significant evidence of an increased risk of *** cancer in women who have had abortions, while others have merely suggested an increased risk."
In fact, the soundest studies--those with the most rigorous methodology--had in fact found no such increased risk, and today an exhaustive study confirms that. According to a study published in the Archives of Internal Medicine, a journal of the American Medical Association, neither abortion nor miscarriage appears to increase the risk of *** cancer.
On paper, you might actually expect abortion to raise the risk of *** cancer. After all, women younger than age 35 who give birth have a reduced lifetime risk of *** cancer; another way of saying that is that women who do not give birth--which tends to happen after an abortion--have an elevated risk. Also, pregnancy seems to spur *** cells to differentiate, which counteracts the effect of pregnancy hormones that make cells divide and multiply (too much of which equals cancer). If the pregnancy is terminated, *** cells might not differentiate enough to counter the pro-multiplication effect of pregnancy hormones.
Whatever happens on paper, the scientists found that it did not happen in real women. Led by Karin B. Michels of Brigham and Women's Hospital, they studied 105,716 women in the Nurses' Health Study II, all of whom answered questions every two years about whether and at what age they had had miscarriages or abortions and whether they had been diagnosed with *** cancer. A total of 16,118 women (15 percent) had an abortion, and 1,458 got *** cancer. But there was "no association between induced abortion and *** cancer incidence," the scientists write.
