Abortion Foes Seize on Reports of Cancer Link in Ad Campaign

Billboards here warn, under the silhouette of a pregnant woman, that “abortion increases your risk for breast cancer.” Radio spots and newspaper ads push similar messages elsewhere in the country. A TV commercial even features a high school coach telling her girls’ volleyball team that she wished she had known all the risks before ending a pregnancy years ago.

This is the ferocious new front line in the abortion wars.

Antiabortion activists from coast to coast are buying advertising, lobbying for legislation, even filing lawsuits in an all-out effort to publicize several hotly disputed studies that suggest having an abortion can raise some women’s risk of developing breast cancer by 50% or more.

The National Cancer Institute and the American Cancer Society have declared there is no conclusive evidence linking abortion and breast cancer. Their experts contend that the studies suggesting such a link are flawed.

“This issue has been resolved scientifically,” said Dr. Michael Thun, director of epidemiology research for the cancer society. “This is essentially a political debate.”

But antiabortion forces refuse to concede on the science. Instead, they speak of a “conspiracy of silence” in the media and the medical community to hush research that would raise doubts about the safety of abortion. They acknowledge that some studies have found no link between abortion and breast cancer. But they say the fact that two dozen studies worldwide--many of them published in respected, peer-reviewed journals--have found at least a tenuous association is reason enough to warn women.

And now they are attempting to use the courts to go after abortion providers who try to reassure their patients that there’s nothing to the alleged breast cancer link.

“They are trying to chip away at abortion rights in any way they can,” said Janet Crepps, an attorney at the Center for Reproductive Law and Policy in New York. “This is a new avenue of attack on the same old theme.”

The first trial on this issue is set to begin Monday in Fargo, N.D. Activists there are suing the Red River Women’s Clinic--the only abortion provider in North Dakota--over a brochure declaring that “none” of the claims about an abortion-cancer link “are supported by medical research.”

Under North Dakota law, any citizen can bring a “public interest” lawsuit to try to block false advertising. The plaintiffs are not seeking monetary damages. Instead, they are demanding that the court require the clinic to warn its patients about the potential cancer risk.

Activists in San Diego filed a similar suit against a Planned Parenthood clinic there, but a superior court judge on Tuesday dismissed the case. Judge Ronald Prager ruled that the link between abortion and breast cancer has not been proved. Requiring Planned Parenthood to provide the information, Prager said, “would, in effect, result in judicial intervention in the doctor/patient relationship.”

Mark Salo, president of Planned Parenthood of San Diego and Riverside counties, hailed the decision. “Misleading women is a desperate strategy, and the antiabortion extremists ought to be ashamed of themselves.”

But John Kindley, an attorney for the plaintiffs, said he is appealing Prager’s ruling. And he is counting on the trial in North Dakota, which is expected to last three days, to “set the precedent that women have a right to be informed.”

If mainstream medical experts won’t issue the warnings, those in the antiabortion movement will do it themselves.

Two freeway billboards sponsored by a local Right to Life group have gone up in St. Louis County this year, at a cost of $4,800 a month. The chapter, with about 150 active members, raises the money through garage sales, Christmas card sales and donations. Similar billboards have been put up in Pennsylvania, Oklahoma, New Jersey and North Dakota over the last few years. And there have been posters hung in the subways and buses in Baltimore, Philadelphia and Washington.

The TV commercial featuring the volleyball coach--produced in English and Spanish--has aired on several Phoenix stations. And a national group is appealing for donations to buy air time in other markets, starting in Chicago.

“I definitely think it’s gaining momentum,” said Karen Malec, president of the Coalition on Abortion/Breast Cancer, which has assembled thousands of pages of research on its Web site.

“We’re trying to use every avenue we can to get the message out,” agreed Connie Pratt, an activist for a Right to Life chapter in Colorado Springs, Colo.

Pratt’s chapter has raised at least $18,000 in recent years to publicize the cancer research, mailing out thousands of bumper stickers, setting up booths at sports events and putting quarter-page ads in the local newspaper. They even sponsored a billboard in a minor league baseball park.

The statewide Right to Life group in Colorado, meanwhile, went so far as to hire a mobile billboard-on-a-truck to trail walkathons raising money for breast cancer research.

Activists are pushing the issue into statehouses as well.

Lawmakers in Missouri, Oklahoma and Rhode Island are considering legislation that would require abortion providers to tell their patients about the cancer research. “I don’t know if they would do it on their own,” said Missouri state Sen. Peter Kinder, a Republican who supports the bill.

Arizona, Alabama and Iowa are weighing more general “informed consent” bills that supporters believe could be tailored to require similar disclosures. Four states--Kansas, Louisiana, Mississippi and Montana--already have such laws on the books.

To abortion rights advocates, such campaigns are a transparent effort to scare women from exercising their legal right to end unwanted pregnancies.

And indeed, some activists admit that’s why they have latched on to the breast cancer issue. “I am into this because I want women to stop killing their babies. They don’t seem to do it for the sake of the babies, so I’m hoping they’ll do it for their own sakes,” said Sue Metherd, president of the Right to Life chapter in south St. Louis County.

Others, however, insist they are simply trying to inform women of all the facts so they can make their own health decisions. If a woman does choose abortion, they say, at least the warnings might prompt her to be more vigilant about mammograms.

“Cigarette warning labels didn’t restrict anyone’s right to smoke. They just gave smokers more information about the risks,” said Joel Brind, a biologist at the City University of New York who founded the Breast Cancer Prevention Institute in part to spread his conviction that abortion can trigger tumors.

The science behind the rhetoric plays out like this:

It is widely accepted that carrying a pregnancy to term before age 30 helps to protect women against breast cancer. Women who terminate their pregnancies forgo this protective effect. But that does not necessarily mean abortion itself increases the risk of cancer, experts say.

The main studies that implicate abortion as a risk factor were conducted by asking women with breast cancer about their medical histories. Researchers then compared those subjects to similar women who had not developed cancer. There was a correlation between abortion and cancer; it was especially strong among women who had ended pregnancies as teenagers.

But researchers at the American Cancer Society and elsewhere contend such studies are not reliable because women who have developed cancer are far more likely to report every detail of their histories than women who are healthy.

They put more stock in studies such as a 1997 report from Denmark, which looked at the medical charts of every woman in the country born over several decades. Every abortion and case of cancer in Denmark is supposed to be reported to a national registry; scouring those databanks, researchers found no correlation between abortions and breast tumors.

Skeptics also point out that even the studies implicating abortion as a risk factor show it’s no more significant for most women than other documented--but rarely fretted about--ones, such as living in an urban area, being tall or having an advanced education.

So abortion rights advocates say it’s not only unnecessary but also irresponsible to raise the issue with patients.

“It just adds unnecessary grief at a very stressful time in their lives,” Crepps said.

Jane Bovard, director of the Red River clinic, is more blunt: “You’re playing with their brains. It’s a scare tactic.”

And one she doubts would work.

Women drive to her clinic from across North Dakota--up to six hours one way--because they are desperate to end unwanted pregnancies. Often they must pass a prayer group of men with rosaries outside the clinic door. Sometimes there are louder, fiercer protests to wade through. And there is a waiting period set by state law: Patients must be offered booklets on fetal development and abortion alternatives 24 hours before the doctor will see them.

Still they come, about 100 a month. And Bovard is sure they would continue to come even if she were required to tell them about the conflicting studies on cancer risk.

When the lawsuit was filed against her clinic, Bovard dropped the brochure asserting that no medical research supported an abortion-cancer connection. Her new pamphlet is only slightly more tempered: It says “a substantial body of medical research indicates that there is no established link.”

Antiabortion activists contend the new brochure is as misleading as the old one. But Thun, of the American Cancer Society, says it’s right on target.

“There is a real upsurge in activity about this issue by opponents of abortion,” he said. “[But] there is no evidence that the procedure of induced abortion affects breast cancer risk.”

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Times staff writer Tony Perry in San Diego contributed to this report.