Preface.

• Author: Bopp, James

The lead article in this edition of Issues in Law & Medicine explains the breast physiology and epidemiologic criteria supporting the abortion breast cancer link and the sociologic factors that cause this risk to remain largely unknown to both medical professionals and the public. Angela Lanfranchi, M.D., F.A.C.S., breast surgeon and clinical assistant professor of surgery, explains how abortion increases breast cancer risk through multiple mechanisms. Pregnancy exposes women to high levels of estrogen acting as a mitogen and genotoxin, and induced abortion then leaves their breasts with more places for cancers to start. They have a higher risk of subsequent premature deliveries that further increase their risk of breast cancer. She concludes that rising breast cancer incidence in ever younger women will continue to expand interest and research of this cancer risk.

The second article, by Joel Brind, Ph.D., professor of human biology and endocrinology, examines the abortion breast cancer link in some historical scientific detail, offering a perspective on an issue that is at the center of a long-running public policy debate that plays out in legislatures, courtrooms, and newspaper editorials, as well as in scientific and medical journals. Even as politically correct studies have been promulgated to neutralize the data proving the abortion breast cancer link, even stronger data have emerged in recent years that firmly link abortion to premature births in subsequent pregnancies, which in turn raise the risk of breast cancer in mothers and cerebral palsy in prematurely born children.

The Verbatim section includes four items of interest. The first is the Brief of Amicus Curiae Eagle Forum Education and Legal Defense Fund in support of the Petitioner in Ayotte v. Planned Parenthood of Northern New England now pending in the United States Supreme Court. It defends a New Hampshire parental and informed consent statute that requires that young women be informed of the causative relationship between termination of a first pregnancy by induced abortion and the increased risk of breast cancer and subsequent premature births.

The second Verbatim is the cancer facts sheet of the National Cancer Institute on...