LONDON, June 21, 2001 (LSN.ca) – British physician Thomas Stuttaford, M.D. has reversed his stand on the abortion-breast cancer link, according to a press release by the Coalition on Abortion/Breast Cancer. Last year in an August 14, 2000 issue of The Times, Dr. Stuttaford, authored an article entitled, “Can Abortions Be Linked to Breast Cancer?” In this article, Dr. Stuttaford reassured British women that abortion is a safe procedure. He declared that, “As yet there is no evidence of a causative link between abortion and breast cancer,” and he incorrectly added, “none has been claimed by Professor (Joel) Brind.”
Less than a year later, on May 17, 2001 Stuttaford authored another article for The Times in which he revealed that he had reversed his position on the abortion-breast cancer research. In an article entitled “Fresh Line of Attack,” he wrote that: “Breast cancer is diagnosed in 33,000 women in the U.K. each year; of these, an unusually high proportion had an abortion before eventually starting a family. Such women are up to four times more likely to develop breast cancer.” Stuttaford writes that “A report by the Royal Statistical Society shows that a termination of pregnancy interrupts the cellular changes that occur in the breast during pregnancy. Once the woman has had children, the effect is less because the cellular changes have been completed….”
Karen Malec, president of the Coalition on Abortion/Breast Cancer, an international women’s organization, offered her comments on this turn of events by saying that “The British scientific community has consistently demonstrated far less bias against the abortion-breast cancer research than has the American scientific community. The British have been far more willing to publish solid research showing a positive association between abortion and breast cancer. We invite the American scientific community to set aside its political ideology in favor of women’s health by objectively evaluating and publishing the scientific research.”