Breast Cancer Surgeon Explains How Abortion Elevates Cancer Risk for Women – LifeNews.com

As breast cancer awareness month winds down, one leading breast cancer surgeon and professor has written an explanation of one of the risks women need to keep in mind when talking with friends and family about the deadly disease — abortion.

Dr. Angela Lanfranchi is a Clinical Assistant Professor of Surgery at Robert Wood Johnson Medical School in New Jersey.

She is a surgeon who, as the co-director of the Sanofi-aventis Breast Care Program at the Steeplechase Cancer Center, has treated countless women facing a breast cancer diagnosis. Lanfranchi was named a 2010 Castle Connolly NY Metro Area “Top Doc” in breast surgery.

In an article she wrote for the medical journal Linacre Quarterly, Lanfranchi talks about why abortion presents women problems and increases their breast cancer risk: A growing amount of evidence from quality studies suggests that induced abortion, but not spontaneous abortion or miscarriage, increases risk of breast cancer.

Induced abortion boosts breast cancer risk because it stops the normal physiological changes in the breast that occur during a full term pregnancy and that lower a mother’s breast cancer risk. A woman who has a full term pregnancy at 20 has a 90% lower risk of breast cancer than a woman who waits until age 30.

As soon as a woman conceives, the embryo secretes human chorionic gonadotrophin or hCG, the hormone we check for in pregnancy tests.

By the end of her pregnancy, 85% of her breast tissue is cancer resistant. Each pregnancy thereafter decreases her risk a further 10%.

Cigarette smoke is a carcinogen. While only 15% of cigarette smokers get lung cancer, the risk has been well acknowledged. In comparison, induced abortion as a risk factor for breast cancer is somehow not as widely publicized.

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