"America's Beauty Is Stained By Abortion"

Our good friend Charnette (her husband is Dr. Tom Messe, the Navy Doctor whose account of his experiences at the April 25 counterprotest was posted here) had a letter (needs a free registration to view) printed in her local newspaper last week. She had an abortion when she was 20.

She has a story to tell, about both her abortion and her breast cancer. Even Oprah Winfrey had her on her show, and the now-defunct ROSIE Magazine printed her story also.

Her breast cancer story relates how she refrained from treatment until her baby was born when she was diagnosed at 31.

Breast carcinoma has always affected women over the age of 35 typically, from everything I’ve read. Even this breast cancer site says, "relatively few women under 35 have breast cancer."

I’ve seen other statements, including: 7% of American women can be expected to have breast cancer by the age of 70; another says 12.5% (one in eight) can have it by age 60. And "Breast cancer affects woman over the age of 35."

This University of Rochester Medical Center site says "Studies have shown that more than 43% of newly diagnosed breast cancers occur in women aged 65 years or older. According to the National Cancer Institute, the median age for breast cancer is 63.”

But, that means that 56% of new breast cancers now occur in women under 65.

It gets worse. In January 2002, a study on breast cancer in young women found this:

TABLE I: Age at diagnosis:
17 & Below: 6 [.30%]
18 to 25: 105 [5.23%]
26 to 34: 1,099 [54.79%]
35 and Up: 757 [37.74%]
No answer: 39 [1.94%]

“These survivors range in age from 17 to 68. As depicted in Table I, the majority of the membership reporting ranged from 26 to 34 years old (with >90% over 26 years); the average age at diagnosis was 33 years.”

So as of 2002, this study found that a full 60.32% of women diagnosed with breast cancer at age 68 or younger were diagnosed when they were less than 35 years old. And give or take, 75% or so of women under 65 first developed BC, not the 56% stated above?

The 2000 U.S. Census estimated in that article that women under 40 living with breast cancer numbered more than 250,000, although the article admits that the percentage of such women is about 5% of total cases.

Even still, this means about 11,000 new cases each year in women under 40.

This cancer victim is speaking to another on this site, saying, “I thought I was young at 44 to get BC but since then I have been horrified by the number of women in their 30's getting it.”

A Feb. 2003 Johns Hopkins Breast Center research site went even further, saying that “While the majority of breast cancer affects women over the age of 50, extremely malignant forms tend to afflict women under age 40 more commonly."

I don’t have the stats (yet) on the BC incidences and onset ages back in the 60s and 50s, perhaps someone else can help out here, but it seems clear that back when abortion was not legal in all 50 states, breast cancer just didn’t happen to many women between the ages of 18 and 50. Maybe it’s not solely causal, but it’s more than coincidental.

That Hopkins site also says “Among women under age 35, African-American and Hispanic women are disproportionately affected by breast cancer...African-American and Hispanic women had a greater proportion of large tumors and more frequently had lymph node involvement, which indicates worse disease.”

And Day Gardner, director of Black Americans for Life, said at a press conference in Feb. 2004: “Abortion is the # 1 killer of African Americans...1,200 Black babies [daily].” Black women have abortions at a rate that is 3 times that of Caucasian women. African Americans represent 13% of our population, yet African-American women have over 35% of all abortions here. Gardner estimated that 14 million African-American children have been aborted since Roe v. Wade.

Hmmm.

It would seem that if we women really give a damn about our “reproductive rights and healthcare,” we’d want to put this issue to rest, one way or the other, bite the bullet and fund that post-abortive research to bring the true results to the light of day. That would be in our best interests, right, ladies? Don’t we want to know? Or are we going to wait until another 20, 30 years goes by and watch the lawsuits start churning out the legal machine like they’ve done against fast-food and tobacco companies?

Sounds dramatic, but who would have ever dreamed that people would sue Micky-D's over french fries?