Surgeon-Oncologist claims birth control breast cancer link

At a recent conference sponsored by Human Life International (I don’t think that undermines it’s crediblity, but I’m sure some will claim that), Dr. Angela Lafranchi, a breast cancer surgeon/oncologist asked a very loaded question:

How often do doctors in America prescribe a Group One carcinogen – one recognized as a “definite” cause of cancer – to otherwise healthy patients?

The answer is something known to most faithful Catholics and others who oppose contraceptive use: “as often as they prescribe hormonal birth control?”

It is seemingly impossible to ignore a profound link between the birth control pill and breast cancer.  Rates of breast cancer have increased by 660% in the last 37 years – there is no other cancer whose rates have skyrocked nearly so much.  And yet, millions of women continue to injest these powerful hormones every day, fooling their body into believing they are pregnant, when actually not.  Dr. Lnfranchi adds:

She compared media treatment of the pill’s cancer risk to that of hormone replacement therapy (HRT), which was found to be carcinogenic in 2002. Once word got out, 15 out of 30 million women in America taking HRT stopped; by 2007, invasive breast cancer in women over 50 for estrogen-receptive positive tumors dropped 11 percent.

Meanwhile, she noted, hormonal contraception – essentially the same drug as HRT and with a similar cancer risk, about 25-30 percent – continues to be touted as harmless and even healthy. And yet, the International Agency on Research of Cancer, a branch of the World Health Organization, classified hormonal contraceptives in 2005 as a group one carcinogen along with asbestos and radium.

And yet, these revelations are almost totally unknown, as the media has assiduously avoided almost any mention of these findings, and even when it is mentioned, there are usually copious rebuttals from “scienticians” claiming that the pill is the safest thing since breast milk, and that its “benefits” outweight the potential risk: ‘one British medical textbook she cited said that, “Considering the benefits of the pill, this slight increased risk is not considered clinically significant.'”  Other studies have shown a 50% or greater increase in breast cancer rates for women who use(d) the pill, especially for women who use it at young ages before having their first child.  So a 30-50% increase in breast cancer is “no clinically significant.”  I think it is to the women who suffer from this horrid disease, millions of them.

Why can we not be honest about this?  Half of women on hormone replacement therapy stopped after the revelations of the cancer risk associated with it – should women not have the fullest information about the risks of the number one drug prescribed to young women?  Why would you want to exclude this information, unless one’s ideological preconceptions so cloud the judgement that the big picture “good” of decreasing the threat (myth) of overpopulation and the “good of the environment” somehow makes this very important information somehow less important?  It’s tragic. 

This doesn’t even go into the link between abortion and breast cancer, which is another huge issue. 

Some people do not like to think about temporal punishments for sin.  The Church has always believed that contraception is a sin.  All Christian churches/sects used to believe that, until about 80 years ago when the Anglicans first got ‘hip.’  I am not stating that breast cancer is the punishment of a vengeful God.  But I do think that God set up certain natural systems to work in certain natural ways, and when those ways are frustrated the consequences can often be disastrous.  I pray that more women will have this information made available to them.  I pray that large corporate interests in the pharmaceutical industry and a general media adulation of contraception will cease so that women (and men) can be given the full information about the drugs they take.   And I pray for a radical change in our culture so that the culture of life will be embraced, and people will again realize that children are not an ornament to be added to one’s life at the perfect age, but are a gift from God at any time.  And I pray we will receive much better formation, as Catholics, from our priests and bishops on this issue.  For those priests that will tackle this “difficult” issue, you have my gratitude, and even more prayers.