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?
The British medical establishment, unlike the American, at first appeared to be impartial. Brind’s study was peer-reviewed and published in the British Medical Association’s Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health where came to the attention of journalists at the Mail on Sunday, who went to the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists for a comment.
There, a top executive admitted to a reporter that Brind’s work had ‘no major methodological shortcomings and could not be disregarded’, and the Mail on Sunday splashed the story on its front page. Brind was encouraged by what he saw as British fair play and thought he would find a receptive audience here, but what followed in the next few years was the usual obfuscation and establishment cover-up which extended to Fleet Street journalists more fearful about a possible loss of abortion rights than they were about the health of women.
I was among such journalists when we met Brind at a press conference in central London in the early noughties. After a lengthy and detailed presentation he opened the floor to questions. A hand shot up and he smiled and nodded, perhaps preparing himself to explain further some points of science, but he was left shocked and speechless when a highly respected health correspondent spat out: ‘Are you Jewish?’
It might perhaps have been reassuring that he was Jewish since Jews have won 22 per cent of all Nobel Prizes. The question was of course an attack on his possible religious faith, aimed at undermining the science by suggesting it rested on dogma. Brind is actually a very secular Jew, describing himself as a general monotheist, a bit like Albert Einstein. He is first and foremost a scientist.
Not that it mattered. The mood in the room was palpable and it was clear to me where it would lead. The RCOG retracted its endorsement before a line was finally drawn under the debate when in 2004 the University of Oxford carried out its own study into the ABC link and concluded it was false.
Brind has argued strenuously that the Oxford study was flawed, but he was no longer taken seriously in the UK https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200607/cmselect/cmsctech/1045/1045we15.htm. Yet nine of ten subsequent studies, as far afield as China, France, the United States, India and Turkey, have supported his findings. One study, conducted in Bangladesh, went so far as to say women who aborted were 20 times more likely to develop breast cancer than those who didn’t. But who cares? We have our own authoritative study and it says differently. The Oxford research is today still much relied upon by our medical and political establishment, with even Cancer Research UK citing it to reassure women that abortion is safe as well as legal.
Expect something similar to happen in respect of contraception now that its safety is also being called into question.
Only last week, for instance, the Daily Mail reported that women in America and the UK are planning a massive legal action over a contraceptive jab linked to the development of potentially lethal brain tumours https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-14764623/Women-claim-seizures-weight-gain-heart-problems-caused-contraceptive-jab-linked-brain-tumours.html.
The lawsuit was launched in Florida by 400 women after a 2024 study in France revealed that injections of medroxyprogesterone, marketed under the brand name Depo-Provera, made it five times more likely for a woman to suffer from meningioma, a type of non-cancerous growth which can kill if it becomes sufficiently large to compress the brain.
This study is, for now, being taken seriously. In October the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency, the UK watchdog, issued leaflets warning users of the risks to their health while Pfizer, the manufacturer, wrote to doctors to advise them to cease Depo-Provera injections in any patients diagnosed with meningioma.
The revelations came just a year after researchers at the University of Oxford provided evidence to show that other types of hormonal contraception are also dangerous to women.
Scientists have long known that the combined contraceptive Pill – which is made up of oestrogen and progestogen – is linked to a 20 per cent increase in developing breast cancer, while similarly high rates have been identified in the coil and contraceptive implants.
The latest study showed that even the new generation of hormonal contraceptives can be linked to the development of the disease. (https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2023-03-22-any-type-hormonal-contraceptive-may-increase-risk-breast-cancer)
Researchers found that women who had used the progestogen-only Pill, the newest generation of oral contraceptives, also increased their risk of developing breast cancer by 20 to 30 per cent. Once women stopped taking the Pill, the risk of developing the disease progressively declined, according to findings published in the journal PLOS Medicine.
Gillian Reeves, Professor of Statistical Epidemiology and director of the Cancer Epidemiology Unit at the University of Oxford, said: ‘Yes, there is an increase here, and yes, nobody wants to hear that something that they’re taking is going to increase their risk for breast cancer by 25 per cent.
‘The main purpose of doing this research was really to fill a gap in our knowledge. We’ve known for many years that combined oral contraceptives, which women have been using for decades, also have an effect on breast cancer risk, a small increase in risk which is transient.
‘We weren’t absolutely sure what the corresponding effect of these progestogen-only contraceptives would be. What we’ve shown is that they’re just the same in terms of breast cancer risk, they seem to have a very similar effect to the other contraceptives, and the effect that we’ve known about for many years.’
This is not great news for the estimated 3.2million women in England who use the combined Pill and the similar number who use the progestogen-only Pill. Perhaps they are unaware of the risks of such contraception. Perhaps they feel they have no other options but to take such risks with their health.
Such safer options do actually exist, however, and not the so-called ‘rhythm method’ but the many methods devised and perfected since the sexual revolution and which today provide women with natural, non-invasive alternatives to powerful steroid drugs. Some of them, such as the Billings Ovulation Method work at least as well as the Pill, if not more effectively. The majority are knowledge-based and therefore cost hardly anything to use – a downside for Big Pharma which isn’t terribly enthusiastic about methods which don’t spin money in quite the same way as ‘medicines’ it can market.
Vested interests would prefer the perpetuation of dodgy but lucrative hormone-based contraceptives, supported by the second plank of abortion when they fail. You know they’ll eventually close ranks, by hook or by crook, just as they did when confronted by evidence of the link between abortion and breast cancer.
Do you really trust such people to be truly honest about your health? Why not search the internet for something better?
