Senator Eric Abetz says studies have drawn a link between abortion and breast cancer. Photo: Alex Ellinghausen

OPINION

There are thousands and thousands of women in Australia who have abortions every year.

And last night, Eric Abetz told them that there was a link between abortion and breast cancer.

Today, of course, he’s sorry and now he’s busy saying that he accepts that there are other views.


Views. Views I ask you.

The Minister for Employment with no expertise in either health or science and no evidence for his views decided to add even more stress to the stress of having a termination by suggesting that women are exposing themselves to the risk of breast cancer.

And his reasoning, if it can be called that?

"I think the studies, and I think they date back from the 1950s, assert that there is a link between abortion and breast cancer," he said.

So, what do the public health experts say?

The intellectual giant of Australian public health research, Bruce Armstrong, is an emeritus professor of public health at the University of Sydney. He says, unequivocally: “It has been conclusively established that it does not -- and this association has well and truly shown not to exist a long time ago.”

But when I asked him why Abetz wasn’t interested in the scientific evidence about this, he said: “We are not talking about science, we are talking about people who have an ideology which dominates any scientific thinking . . . they see everything in the light of that ideology.”

Brian Owler, the federal president of the AMA, responded the moment that Abetz made those comments. He said last night,

"If he's quoting papers from the 1950s, I suspect that's where he's living."

He also said it was very concerning for the AMA to have a number of senior members of government attending the World Congress of Families, where this kind of faux science is being promoted.

“While I respect Senator Abetz’s right to have a position about abortion, what I object to is the linking of these topics to medical conditions to essentially scare people into a particular point of view.”

But he’s even tougher on the prospect of senior ministers in the government pretending to use that ideology as real information.

“We shouldn’t bever give credence to the idea that domestic violence is linked to the use of the Pill,” he said.

And, a word from peer reviewed science of the literature. Professor Simon Chapman, from the University of Sydney, did an overview for Daily Life of the science around the link between abortion and breast cancer.

He went looking for reviews of all the research on the question. There are some individual studies which show that these conditions co-exist and that show an association between the two conditions (but remember, correlation is not causation).

But the overview of the research including a big review published in the New England Journal of Medicine, has two words to summarise the debate.

No link.

Here’s what Cancer Council Victoria and Breast Cancer Network Australia say: “No reliable evidence exists of an association between abortion and cancer.”

They go on to say: “International expert epidemiologist Associate Professor Karin Michels, of the Harvard Medical School and Harvard School of Public Health, is lead author of one of the largest studies in this area. She advises:

“The currently available evidence that is methodologically sound does not suggest an association between induced abortion and breast cancer risk. While there are a number of case-control studies that seem to suggest a link between induced abortion and the risk of breast cancer, these studies are all plagued by the same bias: that women with breast cancer are more likely to volunteer the information that they had an induced abortion than healthy women to whom the women with breast cancer are compared.”

So Senator Abetz, feel free to socialise at the World Congress of Families. Just don’t believe what they tell you and don’t expect us to believe them either.