I think the link to breast cancer is about genetics: have any of your relatives suffered it? No? Then you are most likely quite safe. Blaming abortion for the malady is like saying masturbation will give you hairy palms - an affliction I have never seen in relatives or anyone else.

Runner, what is deeply concerning is that you do not seem to want to follow this argument through and think if this is true for medically induced abortions, why would it not be true of miscarriages. There is the same abrupt hormonal change and change from a pregnant uterus to a non-pregnant uterus. If you truly cared you would wonder about this wouldn't you?

Perhaps it is just simply too dangerous for women to fall pregnant at all, because 1 in 7 pregnancies end up in miscarriage and therefore all men should keep their zippers up and not impregnate any woman.

yvonne

your arguement is a mute point. Miscarriages are not voluntary while abortions are simply a choice ( by and large a convenience choice). In other words even the simple understand one is a choice and the other is not.

Suseonline Statistically the Billings method does work even if there are failures. IN any case the odd unwanted baby is not a disaster to loving parents who can cope with the odd mishap. As for Abstinence it is becoming a popular concept in the US. They say that "True love waits". Maybe it is a bit challenging but people who practice it find true happiness in each other and their children.

Gadfly, you are a lost cause : )
At least you don't turn nasty like our resident 'fundi' Runner.

I doubt many (any?) men would seriously practice abstinence as such.
They would have to take matters in hand much more often, but I have been told by a 'holy site' that male masturbation leads to prostate cancer, so what to do?
This scenario is at least as possible as abortion causing breast cancer.

In any case, the women practicing abstinence would have to be very trusting indeed...

I thought this hoary old chestnut had been put to death in 2004 with the publication of a meta-analysis by Betal et al. http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(04)15835-2/fulltext

Their conclusion from prospective studies was "Pregnancies that end as a spontaneous or induced abortion do not increase a woman's risk of developing breast cancer."

So why did Huang et al. get such different results?

Firstly, because the preponderance of their studies were case-control retrospective studies rather than prospective studies. Retrospective studies are subject to significant recall bias and it is known that women who have breast cancer are more likely to disclose their reproductive history in full than those who don't.

Secondly, the best studies in Huang et al. find no significant difference. It is only when the poorer quality studies are added that a difference occurs. This should have been an immediate red flag to the researchers that study quality was having a major impact on the results.

Huang et al. is seriously flawed because of the latter issue.