A Pro-life Special Relationship

Human Life Review, Winter 2008 by Short, Edward

In February 2007, Mary Kenny, the staunch Irish pro-lifer, who has worked in Britain for many years, provided a useful status report on how the vaunted benefits of the 1967 Act have panned out:

The original campaigners for abortion-law reform emphasized the scandal of backstreet abortions: They also claimed that legal abortion and better access to contraception would mean (a) no more unwanted children; (b) no more children in care; (c) no more cruelty to children; (d) a reduction in "teenage mothers"-the figures had reached a shocking 4,000 in 1966; (e) a reduction in all "illegitimacy"; (f) a reduction in "subnormal"-that is, low-IQ-mothers giving birth; (g) the disappearance of "subnormal" children; (h) a reduction in child murders and attacks on children. In the mid-1960s there were some 5,000 children abandoned to local authority care. Access to abortion would solve all that, campaigners believed. Forty years on, there are now some 50,000 children in care, and, 40 years after the Abortion Act was supposed to decrease "illegitimacy," Britain has the highest rate of single teenage mothers in Europe, and a third of all births are now out of wedlock. As for improving conditions for children, a report from UNICEF this week put the UK bottom of the developed nations' league for child wellbeing.15

If a central claim of the 1967 Act is that "lawful" abortion promotes the health and well-being of pregnant women, Prof. Scarisbrick has been sedulous in calling attention to the various ways in which abortion, far from promoting, threatens the health and well-being of pregnant women. In his most recent book, Let There Be Life (2007), which gives an excellent overview of the British pro-life movement, Prof. Scarisbrick describes the many studies that have been conducted in Britain and America demonstrating the link between abortion and breast cancer (ABC), a link that Prof. Joel Brind continues to highlight in lectures throughout Britain and the U.S. Recently, LIFE invited Prof. Brind to their 2007 National Conference, where he showed how 26 of the 32 studies conducted from around the world connected the ABC link. For those who may not know the medical facts surrounding the issue, there are two main points that need to be grasped regarding the ABC link, as Prof. Scarisbrick points out:

First, it is now widely accepted that a full-term pregnancy, especially if followed by breastfeeding and especially if this is the first pregnancy, provides protection against breast cancer in later years. So, if a woman or girl has her first pregnancy "terminated" she forgoes that protection. Subsequent full-term pregnancy may make good the loss in part, but her defences have been weakened. But that is not all. Studies from around the world suggest that she will have increased the risk of attack, especially if hers is a nulliparous abortion, that is, if she had no full-term pregnancy previously. Since the majority of abortions in Britain are nulliparous, abortion must be playing a part in the alarming and steady increase in the incidence of breast cancer since the late 1970s.... [Secondly], there is a clear biological explanation of the ABC link. In early pregnancy a huge surge in estrogen levels causes the cells of the breast to proliferate. Later in pregnancy these cells differentiate to enable them to produce milk. If this differentiation does not occur the cells become vulnerable to carcinogens. This will happen if the child is born very prematurely. It does not happen if the abortion is spontaneous.16