Proofiness - Charles Seife [90]
In Texas, the state where “Jane Roe” and Henry Wade came from, abortion providers are required to give every potential patient a piece of proofiness in hopes of getting her to change her mind and keep the baby. A 2003 law—the “Woman’s Right to Know Act”—dictates that every abortion doctor tell each client about “the possibility of increased risk of breast cancer following an induced abortion.” The problem is that there is no increased risk. The association between abortion and breast cancer is nonsense.
Over the years, a handful of studies seemed to show a slight increase in breast cancer rates among women who have had abortions, but the subject really caught fire in 1996, when endocrinologist Joel Brind analyzed two dozen studies that had data about cancer as well as abortions. After crunching the numbers, Brind concluded that a woman who had an abortion had a 30 percent greater chance of contracting breast cancer than other women. However, Brind failed to take into account a number of biases that create the appearance of a pattern when there really isn’t one. For example, women who are perfectly healthy are much less likely to report a prior abortion than women who are gravely ill—the ones who are sick are much more likely to be frank about their medical history. (In one Dutch study, researchers found that an even more dramatic result than Brind’s—a 90 percent increase in breast cancer risk among women who’d had abortions—essentially disappeared when you looked only at people in more liberal parts of the country and who were thus more likely to admit to a prior abortion.) A number of larger, more carefully analyzed studies that have come out since Brind’s analysis have shown no increased risk of breast cancer from having an abortion.
The link between abortion and breast cancer is randumbness; people saw a pattern when there really wasn’t one. In 2003, the National Cancer Institute held a conference on the subject—at the end of the meeting, the report stated that it was well established, scientifically, that abortions did not increase the risk of breast cancer. (The report was endorsed by all of the conference participants except for one: Joel Brind.) The scientific consensus was as clear as it could be; the link was fictional. Yet a few months later, Texas passed the Woman’s Right to Know Act. Abortion doctors around the state were forced to put a phony doubt into their patients’ minds—doubt about whether they’ll get breast cancer because of an abortion.
Texas isn’t alone. Under the guise of protecting patients, abortion foes have enacted laws in five other states that make abortion doctors tell their patients about the possible link between abortion and breast cancer. Even though the best current scientific knowledge says that the link doesn’t exist, it serves a political purpose to make that risk loom large. It’s risk mismanagement codified into law, intended to scare women into changing their minds about getting an abortion. And that’s not the only form of proofiness that legislators throw at potential abortion recipients via ironically named “right to know” laws. South Dakota’s abortion law is a good example; it dictates that a doctor must tell the patient about an “increased risk of suicidal ideation and suicide.” Here too, mathematical nonsense has been turned into the law of the land.
It is true that women who have abortions have a higher risk of suicide than those who don’t. According to a 2005 Finnish study, women who terminate their pregnancies are about six times more likely to kill themselves. However, the same study also found that women who have abortions have a higher risk of being murdered—ten times more likely than those who went through with the birth. They were also 4.4 times more likely to die in an accident. These statistics hint at what’s really going on here: causuistry. It’s not that abortions are causing people to commit