Choice Ireland

RHRealityCheck- By Amanda Marcotte. Created Jan 19 2010 - 7:00am

The pseudo-scientific nonsense about abortion and breast cancer has grown so out of control that even pro-science folks with huge hang-ups about abortion [2] have had to come out and denounce the anti-choicers spreading this myth.

All this going round and round on the actual facts at hand is all very interesting, but between my links to Amie Newman and David Gorski on this issue, I think the facts at hand are covered.  But what has always fascinated me---what generally fascinates me when it comes to issues of pseudo-scientific hysteria---is the question of why.  Why do anti-choicers continue to flog this myth about breast cancer, even when they’re shown time and again that there’s no link?  Why do they continue to insist that you’ll get breast cancer if you get an abortion, even though the few, problem-laden studies that suggested a link showed a slight one at best?

At first, the answer seems obvious: They spread this misinformation because they want to scare women off having abortions and intimidate them into giving birth against their will.  But if you think about this for a moment, it doesn’t really make sense.  Choosing an abortion isn’t like refusing to wear sunscreen---most women who have abortions are deeply invested in the choice not to have a baby right then, and a slightly elevated risk of breast cancer (which doesn’t even exist!) will not deter them from having to make a choice they feel they must make.  People make choices that elevate their cancer risk that they don’t need to make all the time---we drink, we smoke, we eat crappy food, and we go out in the sun without protection.  Some times we elevate our cancer risk a lot for no good reason.  A slight to nonexistent cancer risk associated with something that a woman feels she must do for her immediate health, safety, and well-being is simply not going to make a difference.

To hear anti-choicers carry on, abortion must be risk-free in order to be an acceptable and legal choice, and since it is not risk-free, it should be shoved underground and the risks attendant to it should be multiplied.  Their reason for this is presumably that they care about women.  Care about women so much that they want to drive them to illegal abortion and/or drive them to bear children against their will, which is much riskier than having an abortion, since pregnancy and childbirth raise your blood pressure, your risk of diabetes, and of course there’s all the dangers of giving birth.  Their “care” for women is very narrowly defined---it only pops up when it’s a politically convenient cover story to excuse what is an assault on women’s fundamental rights.

With all this in mind, I’m forced to conclude that the reason those anti-choicers---a group of people that is almost unilaterally religious and uses their “faith” as a political tool---enjoy trotting out the breast cancer myth is because it’s an unsubtle way to threaten women who get abortions.  In other words, they’re telling you that if you get an abortion, God will punish you.  And he’ll do so in a highly misogynistic way, going after a symbol of your womanhood, your breasts.

Of course, telling someone God will punish her is basically a way to punish her, but hiding behind God.  The God of the fundamentalists seems like a really awful guy: he punishes gays for not hating themselves [3], Haiti for throwing off the bonds of slavery and colonialism [4], and America for valuing liberty and equality. [5]  Telling women they’ll get breast cancer if they get abortions falls into this habit.  It’s just a way to heap pain on women, probably because Roe v. Wade has made it hard to just toss them in jail for the crime of being jezebels. 

The problem, of course, is that many women who get abortions have absorbed cultural misogyny and sex-phobia.  We all have low moments, moments of grief and sadness and despair in our lives.  And some of us are inclined to wonder, at those moments, if we’re being punished for doing something wrong.  It’s in those moments that being told that God will punish you for having an abortion will creep into your mind, to make your sadness worse and your suffering more profound.

And that, I think, is the true purpose of spreading this myth---not to prevent abortions, but to make sure that women who get them suffer for it, wallow in self-hatred, and otherwise are punished.  Not by God, of course, but by anti-choicers.  And of course, the jackpot for the folks spreading this myth is that a percentage of women who have abortions---as well as a percentage that don’t---will inevitably develop breast cancer.  And the hope is that in that moment of pain and weakness, when a woman most needs to be able to buck up her strength and carry on, that her abortion will come back and she’ll be further wracked with pain and guilt and misery.  For having the gall, when she was younger, to care about herself and take care of her own business.

But they are doing this to you because they “care”. 

Links:
[1] http://www.rhrealitycheck.org/blog/2010/01/13/the-truth-about-breast-can...
[2] http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/?p=2749
[3] http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/washington/2008/04/mccain-backer-j.html
[4] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/01/13/pat-robertson-haiti-curse_n_422...
[5] http://www.snopes.com/rumors/falwell.asp