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"  You may have heard about a a bill in Ohio that includes a mandate that doctors tell women that having an abortion could boost their chances of breast cancer. (If you haven&amp;#039;t, well, now you know.) There&amp;#039;s actually a website called Coalition on Abortion/Breast Cancer that seeks to &amp;quot;expose&amp;quot; the link between the two, which appears to be one of the &amp;quot;sources&amp;quot; used by Ohio Rep. Ron Hood in developing the bill. Not only is this yet another attempt in the part of lawmakers to exercise control of women&amp;#039;s bodies, but it&amp;#039;s also pretty much B.S. While there have been a lot of studies over the years about this supposed abortion-cancer link, organizations like the National Cancer Institute\u2014and many others\u2014say there isn&amp;#039;t one. (Hat tip goes to Politifact for putting out this info.) &amp;quot;This is politics, not based in science,&amp;quot; says Harvard-trained integrative physician and gynecologist Sara Gottfried, MD, OB/GYN, author of The New York Times bestseller, The Hormone Cure. &amp;quot;I see no good evidence for a link between abortion and breast cancer. Ohio must strike down this bill because it makes a difficult choice for women even worse and ultimately is trying to force doctors to misinform women.&amp;quot;  Gottfried shared four legit reasons why she thinks the evidence that Ohio lawmakers are using is both misguided and weak: 1. The pool of women to draw information from is hard to measure. Because of the shame around abortion, many women don&amp;#039;t feel able to share their experience with abortion freely. It wasn&amp;#039;t even legal until 1973, and who wants to admit to an illegal act? Healthy women (without conditions like breast cancer) are also likely to underreport abortions. 2. Women with breast cancer are motivated to do everything possible to get healthy, and studies show they are more likely to report abortions than healthy women. This, taken with the factor above, leads to bias in the studies looking at a link between abortion and breast cancer. 3. The studies that do show a weak link between abortion and breast cancer were &amp;quot;retrospective case-control&amp;quot; studies, which look back on a select group of people&amp;#039;s medical histories (in this case, breast cancer and abortion) and can produce questionable results if not done properly. We know these are often wrong\u2014for example, case-control studies on hormone replacement therapy (showing it was good) were overturned by better quality studies in 1999 and 2002. 4. If you only look at the best quality studies on this issue, such as one done in Denmark, in which 1.5 million women were studied, no link was found between abortion and breast cancer. That&amp;#039;s the study I believe, and it&amp;#039;s not just me\u2014the World Health Organization sees no link based on rigorous review of the data. So, it looks like lawmakers are really just trying to push more unnecessary mandates on women and incite more fear within us, which is just awesome, right?  Want more from Natasha? Follow her on Twitter or find her on Facebook. Photo: Getty Images "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.cosmopolitan.com/health-fitness/news/a13720/abortion-and-breast-cancer/>