News

WASHINGTON, June 30, 2005 (LifeSiteNews.com) – On June 23, US Senator Sam Brownback held a subcommittee hearing examining “The Consequences of Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton.” Testimony focused on the social and medical harms of abortion including the significant statistical link between abortion and incidence of breast and other forms of cancer.
Teresa Stanton Collett, a Professor of Law at the University of St. Thomas School of Law in Minneapolis, testified that Roe and Doe “have significantly undermined the well being of women and children in the United States, as well as seriously damaged the political fabric of American civil society.”
Collett, who has worked with the legal system in Texas to find ways of implementing parental consent laws, criticized the social damage done to women and the women’s movement by abortion. She said that at the time the abortion laws were struck down, women had already made huge progress towards true equality in society, but “not by means of denying their capacity to conceive and bear children.”
Collett said that abortion has changed the landscape for women, making sterility the new model of success. “Rather than furthering these achievements while accommodating the unique maternal capacity of women, Roe and Doe adopted the sterile ‘male model’ of society effectively forcing women to conform to ideal of childlessness.”
Collett then listed the medical harms of abortion, including higher incidents of three different forms of cancer – breast, ovarian and endometrial. She explained that the increase in the hormone estrogen, a known carcinogen, is the culprit and that the early termination of pregnancy, either deliberately by abortion or from miscarriage, causes estrogen to remain in the body.
She cited the landmark World Health Organization study in 1970 by Harvard researchers, Brian MacMahon and his colleagues, who firmly established in the medical literature that having an early first birth is especially critical if women are to prevent breast cancer. Childbirth, said Collett, reduces risk of this disease by causing malignant and pre malignant cells to be shed from the inner lining. The more children a woman has, the lower her risk is for endometrial cancer and breast cancer.
Others giving testimony included Dr. Bernard Nathanson, who again debunked the common myths that ‘thousands of women died from back alley abortions before it was legalized.’
Dr. Joel Brind who has traced the correlation between breast cancer and abortion, dismissed “safe abortion” mythology. He presented an affidavit showing that women delaying the birth of a first child for only one year increase the risk of dying from breast cancer to an extent that is ten times greater than the risk of dying in childbirth.
Read Teresa Stanton Collett’s testimony:

https://www.judiciary.senate.gov/testimony.cfm?id=1553&wit_id=4396
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