Disease has always been used as a political weapon. In many traditional societies, people who suffer misfortune tend to blame their enemies, using serious illness as an excuse to clobber those whom they dislike for other reasons.
Things are not so different in our own society. Some conservative Christians see AIDS as a punishment for the homosexuality that they loathe. And many people believe that certain kinds of cancer are almost solely the fault of multi-national corporations -- tobacco companies, chemical manufacturers, and the like.
There can be no denying that smoking greatly increases the risk of lung cancer, as well as other diseases. But anti-smoking advocates take their battle against the tobacco companies much further than this, hoping to inflict such damage on them through litigation that the whole industry will go under. Smokers are portrayed as victims, who bear little personal responsibility for their habit, which is mainly the fault of the unscrupulous corporations. And all of us are supposedly at risk from passive smoking.
The people who take up these campaigns present themselves as altruists whose only concern is better public health. For some of those involved this may be true. But the passions are often highly selective, suggesting that other motivations are even more important.
Disease that can be sheeted home to big business, or industry in general, no matter how tenuous the grounds, arouses all the enthusiasm. Research pointing to links with other activities tends to be played down, particularly if these activities are ones that the left-leaning cultural elites wish to defend. A sorry example of this kind of selectivity is the fate of recent research suggesting that women who have had induced abortions run a higher risk of contracting breast cancer.
The basis for thinking that this link is more than just an unlikely coincidence lies in the already-accepted role of estrogen in breast cancer. During the first stages of pregnancy, estrogen levels build up, stimulating the production of undifferentiated breast cells, the cells which are the most vulnerable to cancer. In the last trimester of pregnancy other hormones cause most of these vulnerable cells to become differentiated into milk-producing cells.
Spontaneous abortions -- miscarriages -- do not have the same degree of risk, because women who suffer miscarriages have usually undergone a pregnancy in which lower levels of estrogen have been generated.
Since the first suggestion of a link was noted by Japanese researchers in 1957, 25 out of the 31 studies that have been completed have shown some relationship between breast cancer and induced abortion. These studies have been carried out in many different countries, and include women of Asian, African and European ancestry.
In 1996, Americans Professor Joel Brind, an endocrinologist, and Dr Vernon Chinchilli, a bio-statistician, together with two other colleagues, combined the data from the 23 studies then available, and analysed the results. Their conclusions were presented in a respected British medical publication, the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health.
Professor Brind's "meta-analysis" showed that women who had an induced abortion before any subsequent births were 50 per cent more likely to develop breast cancer, while women who aborted a later pregnancy after first giving birth to a child had a 30 per cent higher likelihood of the cancer.
These figures are not high enough to indicate a massive increase in risk, but they are sufficient to warrant counselling women who are considering an abortion about the possibility of danger. Indeed, the figures show an equal -- or even stronger -- relationship than the widely publicised studies linking secondhand smoke to lung cancer and heart disease.
In 1991, when American medic Stanton Glantz carried out a meta-analysis of ten studies and found that non-smoking partners of smokers were 30 per cent more likely to die of heart disease than other non-smokers, the journal Cancer Weekly reported it as "the first clear statement that passive smoking causes heart disease". Dr Glantz, who is currently on an anti-tobacco visit to Australia, claimed that it showed the need for strong legislation to restrict smoking in public places.
But the people who are gung-ho about the hazards of passive smoking are remarkably cautious when it comes to the evidence linking breast cancer and abortion. They seem to fear that anything which might reflect poorly on the safety of abortion will give aid and comfort to the wrong kind of people.
When it came to discussing Professer Brind's work, media commentators who had earlier lauded Dr Glantz suddenly discovered serious problems with any findings based on meta-analysis. Others, including senior cancer researchers, made the questionable claim that the studies Brind analysed suffered from "recall bias", with healthy women supposedly more reluctant to reveal a personal history of abortion than women who had been diagnosed with breast cancer.
Critics also noted that Brind is closely associated with the anti-abortion movement. This is true. But his co-researcher Vernon Chinchelli is strongly in favour of women's freedom to choose whether or not they have an abortion, and there was no disagreement between the two about any aspect of their work.
Many of the other researchers who have reported a relationship between abortion and breast cancer similarly support women's right to choose. Yet when the Endeavour Forum, an Australian "pro-life" organisation, wrote to state cancer societies late last year urging that women contemplating an abortion should be warned about the link, the Queensland Cancer Fund's response was to suggest that those who had found such a link were biased.
Certainly, anti-abortion groups are using the breast cancer threat in their propaganda. But whether abortion should be legal or not is a moral issue. Even if the risk of the operation was considerably greater than it now appears, on its own this would be insufficient grounds for banning it.
Rather, people need to recognise that real choice means providing women with the best information currently available to assist their decision. Perhaps activists will only be willing to publicise such information if multi-national corporations take over the abortion industry.
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