Abortion and Breast Cancer

 

Dr. Joel Brind sets the record straight on who really is the “false witness”

By Dave Andrusko

Joel Brind, Ph.D.

Editor’s note. It comes as no surprise that pro-abortionists save their most awful venom for academicians (including those who self-identify as “pro-choice) who challenge their conclusions. To the Abortion Establishment, which incessantly self-prompts a small circle of its own academics, this cannot stand.

So they accuse those academicians who dare to think differently of being “false witnesses,” purveyors of “junk science.” The attacks are decidedly personal and very inflammatory. [or "and as inflammatory as they are defamatory", Editor's choice:-]
The irony, of course, is that their own papers are studies in dubious extrapolation, ambiguity, the use of one another as “proof,” and conclusions that do not follow from their own data.
Dr. Joel Brind has done the best and most complete work demonstrating the association between an induced abortion and an increase risk of breast cancer (the “ABC Link”). He was dubbed one of the “false witnesses,” by Sofia Resnick in a piece that appeared on the pro-abortion site RHRealityCheck.org.
He responded to Ms. Resnick. The following is an edited version of a much longer response.
Dear Sofia Resnick,

I read your piece this morning, having been alerted to it by other colleagues on the “false witness” list. I must say you have done a clever job of dishonestly framing me and many of my colleagues who research the effects of induced abortion on the women who have them, all the while making sure that quotations from my statements during our interview are accurate and in context.
Your article was well written, framing the accurate quotations in the context of not merely an accusation of willful dishonesty, but rather, of being a liar for hire (as you accused everyone in the series). Well written but deeply misleading.

There are some “experts,” to be sure (although none among the group featured in this piece), whose testimony does not survive even a cursory examination. I have encountered them myself in the courtroom. You might be surprised which side they were on, which is probably why their names did not make it into your article.

In the North Dakota case you cited, the abortion clinic (which was the defendant) produced an expert witness with a Yale Medical School pedigree. He proclaimed—with a straight face and under oath—that the experimental evidence of abortion’s increasing the incidence of breast cancer in rats was invalid because “rats do not have breasts; they only have mammary glands, so they can only get mammary carcinoma; they cannot get breast cancer.” I paraphrased a bit perhaps, as this is from memory, but the meaning was always crystal clear–and 100% incorrect.
Be that as it may, I wonder how can one get a master’s degree in journalism from Northwestern and not appreciate the critical importance of primary sources? Even my own meta-analysis of 1996 and the very recent meta-analysis by Huang et al. in China (which confirmed and extended my findings, as well as confirming my hypothesis—published in the BJC in 2004—regarding the effect of high abortion prevalence on the observed relative risk in Chinese women) are secondary sources. But they are summaries of primary sources.

Then there are the sources you cite (position papers of the National Cancer Institute, the American Cancer Society and the American College of ObGyn’s—the trade association that represents abortion providers. None of these is a primary source or a secondary source. They are tertiary sources—and hardly unbiased. That makes your article a quaternary source.

It’s pretty shoddy work for an “investigative reporter” to make obvious errors. In the interest of time, let me talk about what is, after being called a “liar for hire,” the most important misrepresentation of all. And that is, my work has never been “discredited”—only criticized harshly in some quarters. These are the same sources you prefer to believe, sources who are far removed from actually doing the science of the association between induced abortion and breast cancer.
No matter: you promised to alert me when the article was published, and did so, and so I believe I owed you a brief reply with my reaction, and now you have it.
Sincerely,
Joel Brind, Ph.D.
Professor of Biology and Endocrinology, and
Deputy Chair for Biology and Environmental Science,
Department of Natural Sciences
Baruch College, City University of New York