Science Takes Another Hit from Trump Administration
In case you didn’t catch this, Trump has appointed, for assistant secretary for public affairs at HHS a woman who believes that abortion can cause breast cancer. When challenged by the New York Times, instead of citing studies, Charmaine Yoest argued that scientists are “under the control of the abortion lobby.”
There may be more than one reason for opposing abortion, but making claims about a connection unknown to scientists at the CDC is a long leap into the Alternative Facts Universe (AFU). Forgive me for playing another of my hunches as to the AFU mindset, but I imagine that Yoest’s claim is based on the fact that some women who have had abortions later get breast cancer. Undoubtedly. I’m sure Charmaine Yoest has heard of more than one. The question then to ask is, how many women who never had an abortion also get breast cancer? That is, does the rate of women getting breast cancer after an abortion exceed the background breast cancer rate?
To quote the late great Carl Sagan, “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” Yoest’s extraordinary claim calls for extraordinary evidence. While it is true that never having a child increases the risk for breast cancer—it appears to be related to estrogen levels—it is also true that most women who have abortions also already have children.* One may then ask, how many childless women who have abortions later do have children, and what is their cancer rate? Whatever that percentage, it’s a confounding factor, and a robust study supporting Charmaine Yoest’s extraordinary claim would have to account for it. I have done a modest web search and have not found reference to such a study.
From an article in Slate, where they refer to findings by the National Abortion Foundation that, since 2008, 72% of their clients seeking abortion already have children: http://www.slate.com/articles/double_x/doublex/2011/10/most_surprising_abortion_statistic_the_majority_of_women_who_ter.html
From the Guttmacher Institute (2008): https://www.guttmacher.org/report/characteristics-us-abortion-patients-2008
There is at least one additional confounding factor, which is that 41% of women having abortions are poor (Guttmacher study in 2008). If they’re poor, it’s very likely they have poor diets and poor health habits in general, which would predispose them to cancers of any kind.
The point is not that Charmaine Yoest is necessarily wrong about abortion and breast cancer—her claim could be true—but that she advances no scientific evidence that it’s true, and goes on to say, by way of rebuttal, that scientists are under the thumb of the abortion lobby.
Here’s yet another instance of science taking a back seat to wild surmises among members of the Trump administration. The leading example is the claim that vaccines cause autism, which is one that has been decisively, categorically proven untrue. How many other Trump appointees have one foot in the AFU is yet to be determined, but it may be a selling point for those seeking a job.
* A look at the broader question of health and well-being in general would have to take into account the fact that nuns live longer than other women, even though they have higher rates of breast cancer and very few have children. The rate of breast cancer is not necessarily a good metric for overall health.
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