Induced abortion nearly triples the risk of a woman developing breast cancer. This is a finding of the latest of 51 international studies since 1957 that have discovered and confirmed the link between abortion and breast cancer, the Coalition on Abortion/Breast Cancer (ABC) has reported.

The study (see note below) was conducted in Armenia by a team under the direction of Lilit Khachatryan, of the Department of Public Health, American University of Armenia, that also included researchers from Johns Hopkins School of Public Health and the University of Pennsylvania.

Among key findings related to breast cancer:

• Among the women studied, one induced abortion increased the risk of developing breast cancer by 2.86 times.
• Giving birth reduced the risk of breast cancer among these women by 64% (this is consistent with statements from the Canadian Cancer Society).
• Delaying a first full-term pregnancy after age 20 also increased the breast cancer risk.

Among the Coalition on Abortion/Breast Cancer’s comments:

• The report’s authors claimed that “Most evidence (of an abortion-breast cancer link)…points to no effect.” Professor Joel Brind of Baruch College, City University of New York, said that claim is “plainly false.”
• To support the claim of “no effect,” the researchers cited only one study, by Melbye in 1997 (see references in the ABC press release via this link), that has been severely criticized; the Melbye study reported a statistically significant 89% increased risk for those having abortions after 18 weeks gestation.

A “red herring to prop up abortion”

The Khachatryan team stated that their finding of an increased risk was due to “recall bias.” This is based on the assumption that more women with breast cancer report their past abortions than do healthy women. Dr. Brind said, “The recall bias argument has been repeatedly disproved in the literature.” ABC cites a study from the U.S. National Cancer Institute whose authors “demonstrated that they know recall bias is a red herring used to prop up abortion.”

The Khachatryan study

The study, titled Influence of diabetes mellitus type 2 and prolonged estrogen exposure on risk of breast cancer among women in Armenia, by Khachatryan L, Scharpf R, Kagan S., was conducted because diabetes mellitus type 2 (DM2) and breast cancer (BrCa) are prevalent in Armenia. Researchers performed a case control study of 302 women. In addition to its findings on breast cancer, it concluded that diabetes mellitus type 2 increased adjusted odds of breast cancer by 5.53. They stated that they adjusted findings for age and body mass index (BMI), which confounded associations between DM2 and BrCa, and recommended that: “We suggest our findings imply the need for further investigation in Armenian and in other populations with similar characteristics.”

The study was published in the peer-reviewed Health Care for Women International 2011;32:953-971. Available at:    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/07399332.2011.569041.

To see the Coalition on Abortion/Breast Cancer press release, click here: http://www.abortionbreastcancer.com/press_releases/111128/index.htm

For a chart of the 68 epidemiological studies, 51 of which show a link between abortions and breast cancer, click here: 

http://www.bcpinstitute.org/epidemiology_studies_bcpi.htm