Link between abortion and breast cancer

Gerard Nadal, a molecular microbiologist, blogs about a recent interview with Fathers For Good regarding the link between abortion and breast cancer as well as the link between taking birth-control bills and cancer. Excerpt:

Fathers for Good: Briefly explain what you see as the abortion-breast cancer link.

Dr. Nadal: I first learned of the abortion-breast cancer (ABC) link about three years ago when I came across a book entitled, Breast Cancer, Its Link to Abortion and the Birth Control Pill, written Chris Kahlenborn, a medical doctor. It’s a great read for those who are not medical professionals.

In brief, when women become pregnant for the first time, they make vastly increased amounts of the hormones estrogen and progesterone, which stimulate the milk-producing tissue of the breast to undergo massive proliferation during the first trimester. These cells form the immature and cancer-prone Type-1 and Type-2 lobules. In the last trimester, hormonal changes will mature 85% of these lobules into cancer-resistant Type-3 and Type-4 lobules. Terminating the pregnancy through induced abortion robs these lobules of the last trimester’s maturation and leaves behind a great deal of newly made, cancer-prone cells.

Most women who have had miscarriages have miscarried precisely because they are not producing enough of the hormones estrogen and progesterone and have not undergone the proliferation of breast lobules. Therefore, they don’t share the same risk as women who have had induced abortions.

FFG: How is the birth-control pill implicated?

Dr. Nadal: The pill contains very high doses of synthetic estrogen and progesterone, which mimic a pregnancy followed by abortion on a monthly basis. Studies have shown frightening rates of breast cancer for women taking the pill or estrogen replacement therapy in menopause. They all share the same mechanism for cancer production as induced abortion. One recent study leads some of us to believe that the synthetic form of estrogen in the pill may be responsible for a particularly aggressive and deadly form of breast cancer called Triple Negative Breast Cancer.

Nasty stuff. And everybody gets riled up when some chicken gets jacked with a growth hormone.

Jim Schutze: "So I guess it's this: He's a weird guy."

Rod Dreher has proclaimed that he is "taking a break from blogging on the Catholic scandal" (code for "Not-Sure-How-To-Respond-To-Mark-Shea's-Critique-So-Hiding-For-Now") in order to post tasteful photos and learn Tai Chi. So we will turn to Jim Schultze, a former Dallas colleague of Dreher's, for substantive analysis of his religious viewpoint. Here's a teaser:

My Home Depot source happens to know Freedman, a journalism professor at Columbia, and called him to point out, just for grins, that Dreher actually believes in a syncretism of voodoo, Catholicism and vegetarianism (hence, Crunchy!), according to things he wrote here in Dallas.

I am unable to provide a link to The Dallas Morning News story that was perhaps the best example, an October 31, 2004 op-ed epistle headlined "A ghost in the family," but I can summarize: Various trailer-park-seeming misadventures the Dreher clan in Lousiana involving embezzlement, senility and late-life conjugation can be blamed on ghosts that had to exorcised by a Cajun lady who started vibrating violently and burned her hand when she touched the photo of the dead slut who had come back to haunt the socks off Rod. My Home Depot comrade felt that Dreher was not the one to be looking down his Coonass nose at Haitians and wrote to Freedman to tell him.

Read the whole thing; it's amusing.

Re: vegetarianism: I think Mr. Schutze is off here; he doesn't know about the sacramental chickens. However I don't know the word for vegetable-worship either.

Someone in the comments provides a link to the "Ghost in the Family" story, which I just read. Schutze is a bit mistaken on the plot, but not the overall B-movie tenor. It's one of those stories in which the embellishments are painfully obvious and you can just sort of feel the artistic license flowing liberally like gravy over less flavorful mashed potatoes. Kind of reminded me of Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman for some doubtlessly oblique reason.

Mark Shea Deserves Praise

In a post which could have been penned by our good friend, Diane, Mark Shea writes:

Rod, Rod, Rod:

Last week you ran the grossly inaccurate and inflammatory headline "Ratzinger: Bishop, take your time with that pedophile" and encouraged your readers to make plenty of false assumptions about a case against Ratzinger that, once again, turned out to be utterly insubstantial. You also encouraged your readers to assume that Ratzinger's language about the "good of the universal Church" was code for "don't let anybody know about the pervert" when it was, in fact, boilerplate, mid-1980s form letter bureaucratese for "Hey! We aren't handing out laicizations like Pez dispensers here. These priests who are all bailing on their vows need to slow down and think about the people of God they made promises to." In short, the guy was following basic procedures over which he had little control, not trying to cover anything up and not endangering any kids. Despite your reader Roland de Chanson's quite clear case for the sloppiness of this lazy act of defamation ("contumelious", what a cool word), I've seen no retraction from you on this, just more vaunting of how we all need to be grateful to the media for this grotesque feeding frenzy on Benedict.

Now you hold up Peggy "Keep walking. Some things should be a mystery" Noonan as our paradigm of moral courage in media in yet *another* entry in the ongoing Benedict Media Slamfest?

Seriously, Rod. You have battened on every rumor, every craptastic piece of reportage in the Get Benedict campaign for the past month. Ocassionally, you've been forced to dial back when it became overwhelmingly evident that, for instance, the Times reportage on the Murphy case was crap. But mostly, you've promoted the Benedict bashing far beyond the merits of the evidence and lectured us on our debt to the press while that press has been engaged in gross violations of decency and honesty. And now this encomium to Peggy Noonan, Voice of Transparency and Reform?

Please. When you were Catholic, there was call for you to crusade against corruption in the Catholic Church (though I would hardly say that "following a slow and dumb bureaucratic procedure in laicizing a priest who had been removed from ministry" is "corruption"). But you bailed on the Church and found a new spiritual home in the OCA. It's not my job to judge you for that and I wish the best to you and your family there. However, when you make that choice, it is rubbish to then invoke your duties as a crusading journalist dedicated to the public welfare to make Benedict-bashing mountains out of evidential molehills like the Kiesle case while studiously ignoring the log in your very own communion's eye. If you feel you need to write highly inflammatory headlines based on hair trigger assumptions of bad faith against good men, you might look closer to home at the story of how one of your bishops once received into the OCA a monastery crawling with pederasty (the "abbot" and his right-hand guy apparently imported young Ukrainian novices for all their on-site molestation needs). When this happened, it was under police investigation because one of the young Ukrainian kids, after years of sexual abuse, had stabbed a young nun 97 times.

There's actually a book about the whole depressing mess: Murder at Holy Cross. Is the book biased? You bet. Sort of like Castrillon Hoyos, under the gun from Benedict's Vatican for his stupid behavior, claiming that he had John Paul's full approval. But since there seems to be no problem instantly crediting Hoyos as a proof of JPII's perfidy, I don't see why you shouldn't turn to this book as proof for putting the darkest construction on the heirarchs in your communion too.

Of course, the ecclesial authorities in this matter might be as innocent as Benedict was in the Kiesle case. My money is on the truth that they are. But don't consider that. Your Abp Dmitri lives in the same geographical area. He apparently had nothing to do with it and even opposed it, and we don't really know that the people who did have something to do with receiving the monastery had evil intent, but don't bother with those distinctions. Just write a headline like "Local OCA hierarchy to pervert murder monks: Welcome aboard!" It will be as just and fair to Dmitri as that headline was about Ratzinger.

So: fine. Cardinal Law, I agree, needs to be doing something besides padding around some Church in Rome, doing nothing. Personally, I think we laity should have put him behind bars. You are unhappy that he has not been punished to your satisfaction. Duly noted.

But you aren't Catholic anymore. What's it to you? And before you say something with the phrase, "My sacred duty as a journalist" in it, lemme ask you again, what service to journalistic truth was done by publishing a headline like "Ratzinger: Bishop, take your time with that pedophile" on a hair trigger and inflaming people to mob hatred against a guy who is, as I do not doubt your own bishop is, a good man struggling to purify the filth in the Church? If your sacred duty impels you to send the torch and pitchfork wavers off to crucify Benedict as a guardian of pedophiles on evidence with all the strength and stability of wet toilet paper, why does it not likewise oblige you to crucify your own bishop and local hierarchy on equally dubious grounds?

Alternatively, you could take my suggestion: at the very least, retract and apologize for that headline and for the "Benedict thought pedophiles should be hushed up for the good of the universal Church" analysis that went with it. Cut him the same slack you cut Dmitri and your own bishops, Rod. That's only fair.

I've been hoping for this post for some time, and I firmly believed that it would have to be written if Rod kept up the Catholic bashing. While I disagree with Mark on some issues–especially with regards to how much attention certain topics deserve–I think he really tries, as an apologist, to get to the truth of a matter without counting the cost. I know that Rod and Mark are friends, but Mark laid out pretty clearly and bluntly what was wrong with Rod's arguments for leaving the church way back when and reiterated these points as necessary. And for Mark to be true to his "So That No Thought of Mine...Should Ever Go Unpublished Again!" motto he simply had to write something mentioning Dreher's unretracted defamation of the Pope, his mountains from molehills propensities, his hypocrisy vis-à-vis the OCA scandals and his overall delusions as some type of crusader when he isn't even Catholic.

I hereby echo Mark's call for an apology "for that headline and for the 'Benedict thought pedophiles should be hushed up for the good of the universal Church' analysis that went with it."

Update: Well it seems I've been accused of really, really hating someone―which is a mortal sin AFAIK―in a national publication no less. If y'all are wandering over here from there, first of all a hearty welcome to all y'all. Secondly, check out this post and you can decide for yourself whether or not we hate each other or if it's plain that we just really, really, really disagree about things.

"For if they do this when the wood is green..."

Read it and weep; a very sad story. A tragedy, in fact. It reminds me of this verse from the Passion of our Lord: "Daughters of Jerusalem, do not weep for me, but weep for yourselves and for your children. For behold, the days are coming when they will say, 'Blessed are the barren, and the wombs that never bore, and the breasts that never gave suck!' Then they will begin to say to the mountains, 'Fall on us'; and to the hills, 'Cover us.' For if they do this when the wood is green, what will happen when it is dry?"

"Something between France and Greece"

Please bear with the advertising at the beginning, this is worth watching.

Source.

U of Notre Dame Continues Hellward

Sick and sad. To what circle of the inferno has this brought the University of Notre Dame?

The week includes a screening of the film Prayers for Bobby, which portrays Mary Griffith, a faithful Christian mother who seeks spiritual healing for her homosexual son, as the cause of her son's suicide. According to a review at ReligionDispatches.org, the film biography ignores the real-life Bobby's drug use and "stint as a gay prostitute." The real Mary Griffith has renounced her faith and champions homosexual rights, including same-sex "marriage."

But it must be the fault of religion. Prostitutes and drug users hardly ever commit suicide until a religious person gets involved.

The piece goes on to report ND's participation in the "National Day of Silence" on April 17 which is to protest the so-called persecution of gays and other manifestations of "hate", i.e., Catholic teaching.

Notre Dame also will participate in the national "Day of Silence" on April 17, an event to oppose harassment of homosexual students in schools. Despite the worthy goal, the national event is used by the sponsoring Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network to promote school curricula that equate "sexual identity" with racial and ethnic differences, without clarification about the moral and health consequences of homosexual activity.

The announced agenda for the week indicates no effort to teach students about Catholic teaching on homosexual activity as gravely sinful.

Ironically, April 17 is the one-year anniversary of Pope Benedict XVI's address to Catholic educators in Washington, D.C., during which he called Catholic colleges and universities to a stronger Catholic identity.

I'll leave you with a blast of fresh air from the Pope's address.

"We observe today a timidity in the face of the category of the good and an aimless pursuit of novelty parading as the realization of freedom," Pope Benedict said. He continued, "Particularly disturbing, is the reduction of the precious and delicate area of education in sexuality to management of 'risk,' bereft of any reference to the beauty of conjugal love."

Preach it, Big Guy.

Father Z: What would "actual repentance" look and sound like?

Yes, yes, yes. Someone who says what I've been saying, except this time it's a priest, Father Zuhlsdorf, in his response to Dreher's latest drum solo. I've been saying that what Rod really wants is more Hollywood than holiness ever since he took it upon himself to "cover" the gay priest scandal long ago. Here's part of Rod's article:

Despite being an easy target for unjust treatment by critics – and I say this as someone who doesn’t think Benedict is going nearly as far as he must to deal with the "bishop problem" – there is a sense in which people who want to see actual repentance and reform in the Church over the child sex abuse scandal, instead of show trials and theater....

And here's Father Z's response:

Ummmm.... what would that look like, exactly? What would "actual repentance" look and sound like? Would there not be a greater risk of "show trials" and "theater" if dramatic gestures were made rather than steady quiet reform and change?

I've been reluctant to state this a lot because the learned knee-jerk reply is "Don't you care about the molested children?" And that goes to my theory why not many Catholic commentators want to deal with the silliness and fruitlessness of the demand for a sustained, dramatic self-immolation in front of television cameras on the part of Catholic Church leaders. Everyone should at least acknowledge the fact that this action would do nothing to protect children. And if they think it would, they need to explain how since no one ever has.

Their real problem is this: how do you film "steady quiet reform and change"? And who buys ads to run during the breaks? Those are media questions and problems, and in my view don't go anywhere near the real problem of the sexual abuse of minors, the causes, or the remedies.

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I make me laugh

I was researching my blog's appearance on a search engine result for a phrase which approximates what is referred to in the medical profession as diarrhea when I came across this old post from last summer. So funny—I'm still laughing. I'm sure there's something terribly wrong with laughing at your own jokes; it probably bespeaks some degree of amateurishness. But I did witness John Cleese do it in an interview when he was shown an old clip. On the other hand, Steve Martin supposedly hates his old material...


...so I guess we shouldn't remind him how many more laughs it generated than his new Pink Panther vehicles.