Another year, another round of nonsense about a link between

abortion and breast cancer. It’s

an interesting question to ask if anti-choicers are

misunderstanding a recent report on abortion and breast cancer because they

want to or if it’s because they really aren’t sharp enough as a rule to

understand it (my sense is a combination of both factors), but one thing we

know for sure is that there is no such thing as evidence conclusive enough

disproving their claims that they will accept it. The pseudo-scientific nonsense about abortion and breast

cancer has grown so out of control that even pro-science folks with huge

hang-ups about abortion have had to come out and denounce the anti-choicers

spreading this myth.

All this going round and round on the actual facts at hand

is all very interesting, but between my links to Amie Newman and David Gorski

on this issue, I think the facts at hand are covered. But what has always fascinated me—what generally

fascinates me when it comes to issues of pseudo-scientific hysteria—is the

question of why. Why do

anti-choicers continue to flog this myth about breast cancer, even when they’re

shown time and again that there’s no link? Why do they continue to insist that you’ll get breast cancer

if you get an abortion, even though the few, problem-laden studies that suggested a link showed a slight one at best?

At first, the answer seems obvious: They spread this

misinformation because they want to scare women off having abortions and

intimidate them into giving birth against their will. But if you think about this for a moment, it doesn’t really

make sense. Choosing an abortion

isn’t like refusing to wear sunscreen—most women who have abortions are

deeply invested in the choice not to have a baby right then, and a slightly

elevated risk of breast cancer (which doesn’t even exist!) will not deter them

from having to make a choice they feel they must make. People make choices that elevate their

cancer risk that they don’t need to make all the time—we drink, we smoke, we

eat crappy food, and we go out in the sun without protection. Some times we elevate our cancer risk a

lot for no good reason. A slight

to nonexistent cancer risk associated with something that a woman feels she

must do for her immediate health, safety, and well-being is simply not going to

make a difference.

To hear anti-choicers carry on, abortion must be risk-free

in order to be an acceptable and legal choice, and since it is not risk-free,

it should be shoved underground and the risks attendant to it should be

multiplied. Their reason for this

is presumably that they care about women.

Care about women so much that they want to drive them to illegal

abortion and/or drive them to bear children against their will, which is much

riskier than having an abortion, since pregnancy and childbirth raise your

blood pressure, your risk of diabetes, and of course there’s all the dangers of

giving birth. Their “care” for

women is very narrowly defined—it only pops up when it’s a politically

convenient cover story to excuse what is an assault on women’s fundamental

rights.

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With all this in mind, I’m forced to conclude that the

reason those anti-choicers—a group of people that is almost unilaterally

religious and uses their “faith” as a political tool—enjoy trotting out the

breast cancer myth is because it’s an unsubtle way to threaten women who get

abortions. In other words, they’re

telling you that if you get an abortion, God will punish you. And he’ll do so in a highly misogynistic

way, going after a symbol of your womanhood, your breasts.

Of course, telling someone God will punish her is basically

a way to punish her, but hiding behind God. The God of the fundamentalists seems like a really awful

guy: he punishes gays

for not hating themselves, Haiti

for throwing off the bonds of slavery and colonialism, and America for valuing liberty and

equality. Telling women

they’ll get breast cancer if they get abortions falls into this habit. It’s just a way to heap pain on women,

probably because Roe v. Wade has made

it hard to just toss them in jail for the crime of being jezebels.

The problem, of course, is that many women who get abortions

have absorbed cultural misogyny and sex-phobia. We all have low moments, moments of grief and sadness and

despair in our lives. And some of

us are inclined to wonder, at those moments, if we’re being punished for doing

something wrong. It’s in those

moments that being told that God will punish you for having an abortion will

creep into your mind, to make your sadness worse and your suffering more

profound.

And that, I think, is the true purpose of spreading this

myth—not to prevent abortions, but to make sure that women who get them

suffer for it, wallow in self-hatred, and otherwise are punished. Not by God, of course, but by

anti-choicers. And of course, the

jackpot for the folks spreading this myth is that a percentage of women who

have abortions—as well as a percentage that don’t—will inevitably develop

breast cancer. And the hope is

that in that moment of pain and weakness, when a woman most needs to be able to

buck up her strength and carry on, that her abortion will come back and she’ll

be further wracked with pain and guilt and misery. For having the gall, when she was younger, to care about

herself and take care of her own business.

But they are doing this to you because they “care”.