| Submit your comments on this article |
| Home Front: Culture Wars |
| Breast Cancer Foe Gives Big $$ to Top Abortion Provider |
| 2005-02-22 |
| (CNSNews.com)- A foundation that uses events such as the "Race for the Cure" to raise money to fight breast cancer is jeopardizing women's health by using some of those funds to support local chapters of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, according to a former advisor to the foundation. Planned Parenthood clinics provide breast cancer screening and education, but the organization is also the nation's top abortion provider. "You can't affirm life with one hand and support an organization that kills people with the other," said Eve Sanchez Silver, a medical research analyst and two-time breast cancer survivor who severed her ties with the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation after learning that its chapters supplied $475,000 in grants to local Planned Parenthood affiliates in 2003. Silver and many others in the medical and scientific community believe that abortion makes a woman more vulnerable to developing breast cancer. --------snip----- Silver spent almost four years as a charter member of the foundation's National Hispanic Latina Advisory Council. In that capacity, she helped the Komen organization set national and international policy, particularly regarding Hispanic populations. That all changed after Silver received an e-mail about Joan Archer, a breast cancer patient who returned a wig to an Iowa chapter of the foundation last May. Archer cited Komen's financial support of Planned Parenthood as one of the reasons for giving back the wig. "The people who sent that to me said, 'This can't be true because Eve (Silver) is a part of this organization, and there's no way she'd be a part of this,'" Silver said. "I checked it out to see if it was so, and it was." The following weekend, Silver attended a meeting with Komen's leaders at the foundation headquarters in Dallas. "They were getting ready to revamp their program, and I wanted to know if they would consider not funding Planned Parenthood. "I said: 'As a Latina adviser, I have to tell you that this is a serious break in the fabric of the reality of the organization. It's not in line with what I believe Komen to be. I don't understand why this is happening.' " According to Silver, the foundation officers responded that they were helping Planned Parenthood in an effort to support any organization providing breast care services. However, as the Cybercast News Service previously reported, an examination of Planned Parenthood's recent annual reports shows that while the organization's overall revenue has increased five years in a row and the number of abortion procedures performed at Planned Parenthood clinics has soared during the same period, the number of breast exams conducted at Planned Parenthood facilities in 2003 (the most recent year available) fell by 13.3 percent. Silver's second objection to Planned Parenthood is that the organization was founded by Margaret Sanger, a leader in the science of selective breeding or eugenics. "[Sanger's] plan was to eliminate people of color," Silver said. "As a woman of color, I have no interest in supporting an organization that is designed to kill the very people I'm supposed to be representing." When Komen officials refused to back down on their financial support of Planned Parenthood, Silver resigned from the foundation. |
| Posted by:Steve |
| #12 studies have show 'the pill' to change the user's personal perception of what an attractive male should look like..(bad boy or not, etc) I seriously doubt that's the only mental effect..so I'm anti-pill as well.. other methods for avoiding children work well enough without altering the person |
| Posted by: Dcreeper 2005-02-22 11:18:11 PM |
| #11 The problem with correlating breast cancer occurrence to birth control pill use is that hormone dosage levels -- and estrogen/progesterone ratios -- have been precipitously reduced since the original Pill came out. Also, the number of women who take the Pill to regulate hormone levels has increased, relative to those who take it only as their chosen method of birth control. That first group by definition has other endochrinological (sp?) health factors that could impact the rate at which they contract breast and other cancers, screwing up the statistics totally. I suspect it will take at least another generation before all the factors can be teased out of this particular skein of factors and influences. |
| Posted by: trailing wife 2005-02-22 6:17:24 PM |
| #10 Mrs. D, I would recommend asking your question regarding the pill to others. However, my wife had the same reservations, which is why we used the sponge. And I definitely have grave reservations about the Use of the Pill by teenagers, whose endoctrine systems are just coming on-line. Dishman, the correlation was for a very small and specific set of people: those women who had early term abortions, AND whose mothers had breast cancer. There was very little to no correlation when other factors were considered. The statement in the article does imply a general relationship between Cancer and Abortion, which you picked up, but which is typical MSM incompetence. I mentioned the research, and the constraints, to correct any possible misunderstandings that that misstatement would have created. I make no bones about it: I'm opposed to aborting Human beings, but my aborting the truth to stop it would only make things worse in the long run. I tried to couch my information in the context of a hypothesis that I advocated had to be explored. Go read a typical label on any prescription drug you get: It usually states that certain people shouldn't take the drug, and lists the ailments or other drugs that the drug interacts badly with. I didn't even ASK that women be asked, when they get an abortion, "Did your mother have breast cancer?" I'm just pissed off that PC is preventing funding of what seems to me to be a potentially fruitful line of research. Once you've done the research, THEN you have a basis for policy recommendations, including requiring asking The Question. If the answer is yes, inform the patient of the risks and let them make an INFORMED decision. Doing the reverse is best left to the Global-warming freakazoids. |
| Posted by: Ptah 2005-02-22 3:18:46 PM |
| #9 and one last thought - on the freak chance that anyone actually finding this interesting - but wishing to dismiss it as, "someone would have noticed that before". Not necessarily - as we were not looking at it from the angle of women with breast cancer compared to women without - but rather we were looking at it from the view of typical weight/gain/labs for normal women of similar age and lifestyle, v/s an atypical number of women with breast cancer showing an atypical pattern. In fact, we weren't looking for it at all. It was just there. |
| Posted by: 2b 2005-02-22 3:02:11 PM |
| #8 Quite honestly, I doubt if the doctors would notice this in the same way that we did. Why? Because it was the comparison of "normal women" in the same age group, v/s those admitted for breast cancer that made the relationship stand out to us. All day long, day after day, we looked at labs/weight histories and spoke at length to patients about their eating habits and weight history....not just for breast cancer patients, but for all kinds of patients. And generally, women patients in the hospital, aged 30-50, are more healthy than elderly who often have chronic illnesses. It was in this light that it made it possible to notice this pattern. I've talked to other RD's to see if they noticed it too, but the way we charted things was unique and more detailed than is done in many other hospitals. Even Doctors who treat only breast cancer patients might not see the same thing that we saw, though it does seem they could note higher than average cholesterol levels, but it would have to be for those in a similar age group - rather than as a whole. |
| Posted by: 2b 2005-02-22 1:46:50 PM |
| #7 I'm agnostic on this, and lazy to boot. If abortion does significantly increase the probability of breast cancer, there should be a sharp rise in US incidence after Roe. |
| Posted by: Dishman 2005-02-22 1:28:19 PM |
| #6 Dr. Steve, any thoughts on this? |
| Posted by: Spot 2005-02-22 1:15:10 PM |
| #5 Ptah...very interesting thanks! If it's true, then it is criminal that these studies were squelched. I have an interesting story to tell in this regard. For years, I worked in a hospital where it was my job to chart height, weight, labs, meds and nutritional intake on patients who had in been in for several days. One pattern I noted was that women ...in the 30 - 50 yr age range who had breast cancer (as opposed to other cancers) frequently had very high cholesterol. Not just total cholesterol, but the ratios of HDL to LDL were unfavorable too. Unusually high levels for their age group. One other intersesting fact was their pattern of their weight gain. They had not struggled with weight their whole lives, but rather, the weight increase tended to be more sudden and dramatic and correlating loosely with their breast cancer. The trend was significant enough that one of the dieticians that I worked with, and I used to wonder - Did weight gain and poor diet (resulting in an increase in chol) increase one's risk for breast cancer? Or did the cancer cause the increase wt gain and cholesterol levels? Either way their was a clearly a relationship that was unique to breast cancer patients. Years later, I was reading about dramatically successful endocrine treatments for prostate and breast cancer. You either respond or you don't. Truly breakthrough stuff. Putting that together with the increases and weight gain in the cholesterol of the breast cancer patients, I again wondered if the key to cancer won't eventually be found in the endocrine system. Reading your information above, it would be interesting to go back and see how many of these women had had abortions. Though people often lie about that - it's often in their charts...it could be done. |
| Posted by: 2b 2005-02-22 1:03:28 PM |
| #4 ptah, Any thoughts on the effects of long term use of the pill in all this? I've always had unsubstantiated fears of fooling around with the endocrine system. |
| Posted by: Mrs. Davis 2005-02-22 12:07:46 PM |
| #3 Silver and many others in the medical and scientific community believe that abortion makes a woman more vulnerable to developing breast cancer. Umm, Not exactly. Here's the lowdown as best as I can make it out to be. The best evidence and research falls out as a byproduct of a long term life study of women. Such studies are a goldmine of information, provided one asks the right questions up front. Because many medical conditions are known to be hereditary, one of the research goals was to determine if Cancer was also hereditary. Thus, one (out of a multitude) of medical questions about medical history obviously included "did your mother have cancer?". Follow up is mandatory in these cases, since many of these women's mothers were still alive and hadn't shown signs of cancer YET. When some of the participants developed breast cancer, same as their mothers, the researchers ran extensive correlations involving environment, diet, lifestyle, and other factors. What they found was very interesting: The highest correlate they found was that women whose mothers had breast cancer GOT breast cancer after getting a first trimester abortion. How high a correlation? A Jaw dropping 100 PERCENT. A 75% correlation in a case like this calls for a round of drinks at the local bar AND a paper in the most prestigious medical journals. 100% is totally unheard of. So much so, THAT THE RESULTS WERE DISMISSED. There was NO FOLLOWUP. (The handwave said the numbers were too small to be significant, so the 100% correlation was a statistical fluke. The problem is that the correlation factor has, as a byproduct, an estimation of the probability of the result being a fluke, with the higher numbers indicating a higher probability of flukiness.) What is more significant is that there was NO significant correlation between breast cancer for women whose mothers had breast cancer, AND who either had SPONTANEOUS abortions, OR who went full-term and had their child. The lack of follow-up is what is suspicious to me, personally, seeing how the logical hypothesis that would follow would be this: We know that pregnancy initiates a whole slew of biochemical changes in a woman's body. One of those stimulates the growth of breast cells in order to prepare the woman for nursing (I had a lady friend who had been quite delighted about the increase in her bust size while she was pregnant with her daughter). The Hypothesis states that as the preganacy proceeds to the latter stages, a different set of hormones kicks in to counteract the initial surge from the first kind of hormone (The study of hormones reveals that they come in counteracting pairs, and it is rare to find a hormone that acts like an accellerator without finding one that acts like a brake.) The hypothesis states that the initial hormone dosage at the beginning of the pregnancy sets up conditions that would normally be favorable for breast cancer to develop, but only if allowed to continue. A side effect of the second hormone set dosage counteracts the effects of the first set, removing the conditions that would, left unremoved, would allow breast cancer to develop. The hypothesis accounts for the study results thusly: the early term pregnancy introduces the first hormone set, but the early term abortion prevents the introduction of the second hormone set. If the pregnancy is continued, then the second hormone set is introduced. The spontaneous abortions, followed by no statistically equivalent change in breast cancer frequency, can be explained by stating that the first hormone set is NECESSARY for the pregnanacy to continue, AND that the hormones are probably fetal or placential in origin: Many hormones in nature do multiple duties and have multiple effects on the body, based on the organ system being affected, so this is not unusual. Mind you, this is just a hypothesis: the value of any hypothesis lies in its ability not only to explain the facts (any LLL can do THAT), but suggest alternate lines of research to pursue. You have to actually pursue the research to determine whether the hypothesis is worth elevating to a theory or should be discarded. For instance, this suggests we MUST start tracking women who have had abortions and do life studies to confirm the effect. This suggests that we MUST do such research in order to determine if women at risk in this situation should be warned. This suggests that we should look closely at hormone level increases or decreases during the early part of pregnancy, and correlate gainst any counter changes in the latter part of pregnancy. This suggests we should be looking closely at hormone levels in woman and spontaneously aborted child. Once we've determined what hormone (or hormones) are involved and to what degree, we should synthesize them and start clinical trials in abortion clinics to determine the efficacy of post-abortion injections of these hormones. Clinical trials should be started to monitor pregnant women early in their pregnancy, identify those with hormone imbalances, give some remedial hormone treatments, and track the results. Most importantly, if these hormones always work, and pregnancy only affects the levels, then some breast cancers may be caused by haywire hormone levels and can be treated, or better yet, prevented, by hormone treatment intervention. There is so FREAKING MUCH that can come out of pursuing the research: Post abortion prevention of cancer. A possible cure or preventative for cancer. A possible treatment that would save some pregnancies that would otherwise be terminated. But it is NOT being pursued because of POLITICAL CORRECTNESS: "Abortion is a low-risk procedure" is the mantra of PP and NOW, and nothing must be allowed to contradict The Word Of The Priestesses of Female Equality. The following weekend, Silver attended a meeting with Komen's leaders at the foundation headquarters in Dallas. "They were getting ready to revamp their program, and I wanted to know if they would consider not funding Planned Parenthood. "I said: 'As a Latina adviser, I have to tell you that this is a serious break in the fabric of the reality of the organization. It's not in line with what I believe Komen to be. I don't understand why this is happening.' " According to Silver, the foundation officers responded that they were helping Planned Parenthood in an effort to support any organization providing breast care services. God-damned Liberalism itself is a serious break in the fabric of reality. Too bad it doesn't involve creation of a wormhole to swallow up the offenders... |
| Posted by: Ptah 2005-02-22 11:55:00 AM |
| #2 wow! I think it's a mistake for CNS to try and turn this into a pro-life issue as they seem to be doing in this article. It is an outrage that money, which people, (including myself) contributed in the belief that it was going to fund the fight against breast cancer, was diverted to ANYTHING other than it was intended. Class action fraud time. Where do I sign up. |
| Posted by: 2b 2005-02-22 11:33:37 AM |
| #1 Apparently the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation has plenty of money if they can afford to give some to other places. |
| Posted by: eLarson 2005-02-22 11:24:33 AM |