People v. State

Komen, I think, is going down the toilet, where it belongs. In a post today by a guest blogger at Turley’s blog about a top Komen fundraiser who is quitting in disgust and who in an angry letter condemned the decision to end funding for Planned Parenthood and called for the resignation of Komen’s CEO and founder, it is written: “While donations from the Planned Parenthood haters have helped, they may not be sustainable.” That may be the understatement of the year, given that Komen quickly reversed its decision, caving to pro-abortion political pressure and revealing a yellow streak a mile wide. (Incidentally, in a comment on the post Scott Greenfield makes a very good point about Komen but confirms that he is a true blue New York liberal.)

I wondered what the Coalition on Abortion / Breast Cancer thought about all this, and checked in at its website. (I was around when the Coalition was formed, living in the Chicago area at the time, where the Coalition is based.) In a press release issued after Komen’s decision to defund Planned Parenthood but before its decision 3 days later to refund it, the Coalition’s president applauded Komen for discontinuing its grants to Planned Parenthood but said: “Personally, I will not donate to Komen while it is still cooperating in the cover-up of the abortion-breast cancer link . . . .”

I also learned from the press release that the “Coalition on Abortion/Breast Cancer was the first to expose the Komen-PP relationship to the world in 2003.” (2003 was when I ran into that brick wall in North Dakota, which all but ended my legal career before it began, and I’ve pretty much washed my hands of the abortion-breast cancer business ever since. As far as I’m concerned, the North Dakota supreme court judges who decided the Red River Women’s Clinic case have blood on their hands. A river of it.) I also learned from the Coalition’s press release that 52 out of 67 epidemiological studies now show a positive association between induced abortion and increased breast cancer risk. (Back when I wrote my Wisconsin Law Review article Comment on this subject it was 25 out of 31, with 17 of the 25 showing a “statistically significant” positive association.)

The Coalition’s press release links to this breakdown of the 67 extant studies (updated in November 2011) on the website of the Breast Cancer Prevention Institute (founded by my expert witness in the Red River case). The five most recent studies, published between 2008 and 2011, all found a statistically significant positive association between induced abortion and breast cancer risk. One of these five studied American women, and is available in its entirety here on the Coalition’s website. Here’s the first three sentences of the Results section of that study:

In analyses of all 897 breast cancer cases (subtypes combined), the multivariate-adjusted odds ratios for examined risk factors were consistent with the effects observed in previous studies on younger women (Table 1). Specifically, older age, family history of breast cancer, earlier menarche age, induced abortion, and oral contraceptive use were associated with an increased risk for breast cancer. Risk was decreased in relation to greater number of births and younger age at first birth.

Follow