After a fierce pressure campaign, the Religious Right is positively giddy about the Susan G. Komen for the Cure Foundation’s move to stop funding breast exams and mammogram referrals at Planned Parenthood, which conducts approximately 750,000 breast exams every year.
Now, anti-choice activists are returning to the discredited charge that abortion causes breast cancer.
To be clear, the US National Cancer Institute found that both induced and spontaneous abortion “is not linked to an increase in breast cancer risk” and a study by Harvard professor Karin B. Michels of the Harvard Medical School similarly concluded that “neither induced nor spontaneous abortion was associated with the incidence of breast cancer.”
Furthermore, the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists claim that the most recent and methodologically sound studies “demonstrate no causal relationship between induced abortion and a subsequent increase in breast cancer risk” and the American Cancer Society called the purported link a “false alarm” since “the scientific evidence does not support the notion that abortion of any kind raises the risk of breast cancer or any other type of cancer.”
Talk show host Janet Parshall appeared on Today’s Issues with Ed Vitagliano and claimed that Komen was in an “unholy alliance” with Planned Parenthood and said “might be a cause of some of the reasons why people are wearing pink ribbons, pink t-shirts and running in the race.” Vitagliano said that legal abortion “may very well be an explanation of why the incidence of breast cancer in this country is so staggeringly high”:
Bryan Fischer on Focal Point today alleged that “early abortions are a risk factor, a huge risk factor, perhaps the main risk factor for breast cancer.” According to Fischer, “Planned Parenthood is out there causing breast cancer”:
Fischer also praised Karen Handel, the former Republican politician with a history of attacking Planned Parenthood who was recently named Komen’s Vice President for Public Policy, as a hero for “standing in the gap” against “the Enemy”:
