c. 1996 Religion News Service

(Frederica Mathewes-Green is a member of the Eastern Orthodox Church. She is the author of the recent book”Real Choices”(Multnomah) and a frequent contributor to Christianity Today magazine.)

(UNDATED) While visiting a Texas shrine to the Virgin Mary this weekend I noticed a form of devotion I hadn’t encountered before: Pilgrims had expressed their faith in the healing powers present by pinning up silver images of the objects of their prayer. On small plaques the size of playing cards were pictured a leg, a little boy, an arm, a woman, an eye. One bore a surprising image: a pair of breasts.

Exposed breasts look out of place at a religious shrine, because the common association is with naughty sexuality, low-cut Playboy fare. But of course this is not what they mean to the women who live with them. For women, our breasts are body parts as familiar as an elbow, not something we don for special occasions, like a cocktail dress. Their presence is routine, and as likely to be associated with other bodily processes as with their sexy social meaning. They can signal pregnancy or oncoming menstruation with aching, or embarrass a new mom with a sudden letdown of milk.

And they can mean death. These silver breasts were not displayed at the shrine because the petitioner was so proud of her pair. Over barriers of culture and language women can understand each other here. The pilgrim pinned up this image because she was scared.

I know about this. My mother and grandmother have both had mastectomies. As October brings another Breast Cancer Awareness Month around, women continue to stand helpless before the increasing tide of this disease.

A recent report in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health described one more, and somewhat unexpected, potential cause of breast cancer: abortion. People find it easy to believe that abortion, badly performed, could result in outright injury to the reproductive organs, but the connection to breast tissue is not so easy to understand. Yet this analysis of 23 independent studies spanning 40 years showed a consistent correlation. Allowing for variation due to the woman’s age and childbearing status, abortion can increase her chance of eventually developing breast cancer by 50 percent.

The mechanism has to do with something that women have been saying for decades now: We are whole beings, not assemblages composed of detachable parts, not X-rated Mrs. Potato Heads. What affects any part of our bodies affects all. Early in pregnancy estrogen begins preparing the breasts for eventual breastfeeding, and cells multiply at tremendous speed. Late in pregnancy, other hormones counteract this initial onrush as they complete the process. For this reason, a completed pregnancy gives an innoculation-like measure of protection against breast cancer.

When the body is preparing for miscarriage, estrogen levels do not reach the heights they would in a healthy pregnancy, so an increased danger of cancer is not observed. But when a healthy pregnancy is artificially interrupted, the estrogen coursing at breakneck levels never meets its counteracting force. Estrogen makes things grow, good cells and bad together. Abortion may empty the womb, but it does not end the process in the breasts.

A number of objections have been brought against the report’s chief author, Dr. Joel Brind. It is argued that the increase is small: less than a doubling of risk, while cigarettes increase the risk of lung cancer 20 times. The connection is still a valid cause of concern, however, and information each woman should be free to consider and make her own decision about _ not something well-meaning authorities conceal because it might upset her. In the fight against breast cancer, information is not the enemy.

Others have questioned Brind’s analysis. A 1989 Swedish study is offered in refutation, but though it claims to have examined 49,000 cases, an age-restriction was imposed on the data and only 65 women were actually included in the study. These women who had become pregnant and aborted were not compared with women who had become pregnant and continued to birth, but rather with women who had never conceived _ and who thus lacked the extra protection that childbearing confers. A woman considering abortion needs to compare apples with apples _ she can’t go back to the orange of having never been pregnant.

In fighting the war against breast cancer we need all the help we can get. Dr. Joel Brind is to be congratulated for his courage in producing a study that is certain to be attacked and dismissed because of its unsettling implications, though they shouldn’t be too surprising. Artificial tampering with women’s fertility can have surprising, and deadly, repercussions.

It’s not nice to fool Mother Nature.

MJP END GREEN