Printer-friendly versionAbortion: Best Predictor of British Breast Cancer Patrick Carroll, director of the London based Pensions and Population Research Institute, presented his research on abortion as the “best predictor of British breast cancer trends” at a conference in Paris on September 7, 2005. He reported three trends:

1. British upper class women are more likely to develop breast cancer and to die of the disease than are lower class women. Upper class women are more likely to delay the birth of a first child and to abort before the birth of a first child.

2. Geographical variations in breast cancer rates across the British Isles can be explained by the abortion rate. Ireland, which prohibits abortion, has the lowest breast cancer rate in the British Isles. London and the Southeast, where abortion is most prevalent, have the highest breast cancer rates.

3. Breast cancer rates between 1971 and 2002 increased approximately 70%. Carroll studied breast cancer rates for women ages 50-54 born in the years 1926-1946 and found that breast cancer rates were highly correlated with abortion rates and less highly correlated with fertility and other factors.

Carroll’s research is significant because he used national data reporting breast cancers and abortions. Therefore, it is free of any possibility of a hypothetical problem called “recall bias”. Opponents of the abortion-cancer link have never provided credible evidence of recall bias. Nevertheless, they argue that research depending on interviews with women to report their abortion histories are flawed, because more cancer patients than healthy women accurately report their abortions.