Abortions Don’t Add To Cancer Risk Danish Study Sees No Rise In Breast Cancer After Abortion

Having an abortion does not increase the risk of breast cancer for the majority of women, according to the largest study on the issue to date, to be published today in the New England Journal of Medicine.

Using records for all women born between 1935 and 1978 in Denmark, where abortion is legal and its reporting is mandatory, Danish researchers linked abortion information to breast cancer diagnoses among 1.5 million women, 18 percent of whom had had an abortion.

In the 95 percent who had had abortions between seven and 12 weeks of gestation, the most common time to have an abortion, there was no increase in risk of breast cancer.

“The public health question should be answered, which means that for the majority of women who have an abortion, there’s no increased risk of breast cancer,” Dr. Mads Melbye, the lead researcher from the Statens Serum Institut of Copenhagen, said in a phone interview.

“This study is a great leap,” said Dr. Patricia Hartge of the National Cancer Institute. “It is well conducted with a complete population. And because the abortion data is accurate, it really is a move ahead.” In an editorial accompanying the study, Hartge wrote: “In short, a woman need not worry about the risk of breast cancer when facing the difficult decision of whether to terminate a pregnancy.”

But Dr. Joel Brind, professor of endocrinology at Baruch College at City University of New York, called the study “horrible … not an honest piece, not a good piece.”

Brind, who is against abortion, is the chief author of a meta-analysis (an overall look that combines previous studies) published last year showing an increase in risk of breast cancer in women who had abortions.

He cited two objections to the Danish study: Although the study included women from 1935 to 1992, it apparently only used data on abortions from 1973 onward. Since most women get breast cancer when they are older, this could mean critical data is lacking on whether these older women had had abortions or not, Brind maintained.

Similarly, women were included in the study, many of them in teens or 20s, who had had an abortion less than four years previously, and who would not be likely to show signs of breast cancer.

Melbye said that he and his colleagues specifically looked to see if there was any difference in risk relative to age or to the calendar time of the abortion or diagnosis of cancer.

“There was no difference,” Melbye said. “He is wrong.”

Not all women who had had abortions showed no increase in risk in Melbye’s study.

In the 2.3 percent of women who had second-trimester abortions, the researchers found an overall increase of 38 percent in the risk of breast cancer.

Conversely, among the 3 percent who had abortions at less than 7 weeks, there appeared to be about 20 percent less risk of breast cancer, the study found.