Archive for the ‘Questionable Research’ Category

Has the G-spot finally been located and verified? We’ll get to that, but first we need to look at the history of the controversy.

I have been covering the issue of the g-spot for many years now. The one thing I notice  is that it is always male researchers who deny that it exists. I honestly can not think of a single female researcher in the denial camp (although I suppose it is possible and I missed it).

None of this is surprising. We know far more about male sexuality than we do about female sexuality, and not just because the male parts are simpler. The same is true about women’s biology in general. Historically, it was thought that it was more important to study men.

Then there is the tradition of things being all in women’s head. I have fibromyalgia, a condition that primarily affects women. It has long been ignored and dismissed as something that has all been in women’s heads. Despite the increasing knowledge and hard physical evidence that has been attained just in the last few years, there are still, and almost exclusively male, doctors who deny its existence.

I have seen first hand how male doctor’s dismiss women’s experiences with their own bodies. I have a close female friend who has a tethered brain stem. As you can imagine, this leads to all sorts of problems, including an inability to drive, which is why I took her to the doctor and was involved with the search for a diagnosis. It took a long time and a number of specialists before we got to that point. Getting her to specialists in the first place was like pulling teeth, though, because her male doctor insisted that it was all in her head. Technically it was, but not in the way that he thought.

Considering the long history of male dismissal of women, it is not surprising that there is still a debate about the g-spot. To many men, the fact that countless women report a different type of orgasm through g-spot stimulation is irrelevant. Many men do not care what women have to say about themselves. They consider women unreliable reporters of the conditions of their own body.

One of my favorite science bloggers, P.J. Meyers, recently wrote this: “My favorite argument against Intelligent Design is the fact that the clitoris is located nowhere near the cervix — for women, reproduction and recreation are fairly effectively uncoupled. But that doesn’t stop some people from imagining the existence of a vaginal source of sexual pleasure, the G-spot. I don’t believe it exists; I do believe that individuals can be sexually stimulated by contact in all kinds of places, from vagina to toes to neck to belly-button, that it varies from person to person, and that you don’t need to find an excuse in sloppy anatomy to justify what makes you feel good.”

Doctor Meyers is a biologist that many might even consider a feminist, and he is generally pretty reasonable about women’s issues and women’s equality. He is not, however, an expert on sexuality.

While he is brilliant, this is an area I have far more experience in than he does. Not only have I talked to researchers studying the g-spot, I have used my hand on dozens of women on this supposedly mythical area to generate an orgasm without clitoral stimulation, an orgasm that is amazingly intense and that they report as feeling different from other types of orgasm.

This is the male blindspot on this issue. For most men, an orgasm is an orgasm is an orgasm. They are all pretty much the same. This is not true for more sexually experienced men. For example, many have reported a different type of orgasm from prostate stimulation.

For women, though, the sensation of orgasm can differ quite a bit. It is not always the same. There is quite a lot of diversity. For example, my wife can orgasm from foot stimulation. She will report, though, that it is not exactly the same as a g-spot orgasm, or a clitoral orgasm.

Doctor Meyers is partly correct in that women can achieve orgasm through a number of different forms of stimulation. They do know the difference between them, though. A g-spot orgasm is a distinct type of orgasm. It is replicable. It has been my personal experience that most women can achieve a g-spot orgasm.

So, why then do so many, mostly men, deny the existence of the g-spot? Because they can’t find it. Not anatomically, at least. This should not be surprising. Consider how long it takes many of them to find the clitoris.

The most recent thinking has been that the g-spot is actually just the back side of the clitoris, a larger structure than we normally think of it as being. But still, in 60 years of research, no certain anatomical structure has been proven to be the g-spot.

In 2010, a team of researchers at King’s College London published a study in the Journal of Sexual Medicine. That study claimed that the G spot was possibly a figment of women’s imaginations, one encouraged by the popular press and sexuality professionals.

This does not explain references to this spot in ancient sex manuals, long before Dr. Grafenburg gave it a name in the 1940s. It does not explain why women who have not heard of the g-spot have g-spot orgasm anyway. In fact, it sounds quite familiar- it is all in women’s heads. This is the fallback position in medicine when it comes to women. I can’t figure it out, she’s a woman, so it must just be in her head.

Frankly, the King’s College research was total crap. Here is how they went about it. They used a sample of over 1,800 women, and concluded that no pattern emerged between identical versus non-identical twins when participants were asked if they had a G spot. This indicated that there could not be a gene at play which would be shared by identical twins, thus the g-spot must be a myth.

Really? You are simply asking women if they have a g-spot? Here is a key bit of information. Like the clitoris, the g-spot is not normally stimulated during intercourse. In fact, it is very difficult to do with your penis. Fingers are a far better tool. A woman can go her entire life without ever having her g-spot directly stimulated.

It requires someone who knows what they are doing. You have to know where the right spot is, the proper type of stimulation (it is more about pressure than thrusting in and out), and you have to know that it is easier to stimulate once a woman is sexually aroused, and that as she become more aroused the interior of the vagina changes shape a little and the area you need to stimulate actually moves a bit. Once you figure all of this out you can pretty much consistently hit the spot and help her achieve this type of orgasm.

I have personally observed g-spot orgasm countless times, as an observer watching the techniques of experts, and personally with dozens of women. I have talked to the women who have experienced them. It is not just something that is all in their head. A specific procedure is required for this type of orgasm.

Is it a spot, a particular type of pressure in a certain area, or something else? I don’t know. But it is not fictitious. In fact, the proper technique is somewhat counter intuitive. You would not think that this technique would lead to such an intense orgasm. And yet, I have personally observed it countless times.

Here is what brings this all back into the news. It is a new study published in this month’s The Journal of Sexual Medicine. Dr. Adam Ostrzenski claims he has found an anatomical structure that could be the g-spot. He found it while dissecting the cadaver of an 83 year old woman.

According to Ostrenski,”The anatomic existence of the G-spot was documented with potential impact on the practice and clinical research in the field of female sexual function,” and he concluded “The anatomic discovery of the G-spot existence may inspire a new study for establishing the anatomic presence of ‘a female prostate.”

So, is this it? Are we done? Is the controversy over? No. This is a single study on a single cadaver. It points the way towards future research. It could prove out, or it could go nowhere. Too early to tell.

Personally, if they never find a specific anatomical structure, I am fine with that. Time and time again, you can teach the technique of g-spot stimulation, and women do achieve g-spot orgasm. Sure, it is possible that some women can not achieve g-spot orgasm. But, I have seen results in the majority of women who have tried, when with an experienced partner.

In my many years as a sexual libertine, I have seen women have a lot of orgasms. They report that a g-sport orgasm feels different. I have been intimately involved with these types of orgasm and it seems different to me to.

We can not absolutely rule out that this is a psychological phenomena. Self-reporting can be unreliable. For those of us whose experience with g-spot orgasm that is more than theoretical, I think that is unlikely.

When the author of a study that is your sole example to make a scientific claim in a court case repudiates his own work, what does that leave you with? Not much. That is now the case with the federal trial revolving around California’s Proposition 8. Sure, the trial was a mockery in and of itself, with the Pro Prop 8 site offering virtually nothing in the way of testimony to demonstrate why gays should be discriminated against. They did go after a legal argument though, whether homosexuality was an immutable condition. In other words, can you change, or are you born that way?

That is a legal argument that does little to explain why gays should be discriminated against, and goes more towards the argument that they should be discriminated against because they chose to be gay. It is their own fault. They could change if they wanted to. How can they be a protected class if it is a class of their own choosing? With that same reasoning, though, you could also argue for discrimination against people based on their religion.

Virtually the entire scientific community rejects the hypothesis that you can simply change your sexual identity. There is an exception. His name is Dr. Robert Spitzer, and his peer reviewed study arguing that homosexuals can change and become heterosexuals was published in the October 2003 issue of the Archives of Sexual Behavior.

Spitzer himself is a highly respected researcher. He was a leading voice in the early 1970s to declassify homosexuality as a mental disorder in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) of the American Psychiatric Association.

His work was cited in the Prop 8 case- it is pretty much the only work of its type to be available to cite. It has been cited by virtually every anti-gay organization. Now, though, Dr. Spitzer admits that his work was flawed. And wrong.

Spitzer even apologized to the gay community for the harm that his flawed research caused, writing, “I believe I owe the gay community an apology for my study making unproven claims of the efficacy of reparative therapy. I also apologize to any gay person who wasted time and energy undergoing some form of reparative therapy because they believed that I had proven that reparative therapy works with some ‘highly motivated’ individuals.”

The problem with this and any similar studies is that it negates the entire concept of bisexuality. If I am bisexual with a predominant interest in men, but still have some interest in women, then marrying a woman because my religion and society tells me that is the only acceptable choice is not such a big deal. It is a big deal, though, if I were at the far end of the Kinsey scale with no sexual interest in women at all. Until you eliminate this factor from the study and only look at men with no interest in women who were converted to a new found sexual attraction to women, then your study is meaningless.

We can see problems right away with Spitzer’s study. It was self selecting for men and women who were Christian with religious beliefs that told them that homosexuality was sinful. That was true for 80 percent of the respondents. They were motivated by their religion to change. Did they lose their same sex attraction? Only 11% of the men claimed that they did.

The real flaw of the study was noted in the letter by Spitzer to the editor of the Archives of Sexual Behavior. He wrote: “” The Fatal Flaw in the Study –- There was no way to judge the credibility of subject reports of change in sexual orientation. I offered several (unconvincing) reasons why it was reasonable to assume that the subject’s reports of change were credible and not self-deception or outright lying. But the simple fact is that there was no way to determine if the subject’s accounts of change were valid.”

It was self-reporting by people who were highly motivated by their religion to make others believe that homosexuality could be cured- even if they themselves in actuality did not find a cure for themselves. As Spitzer pointed out, it answered the question of what people who had undergone reparative therapy and claimed it was successful had to say about it, without looking more deeply at what really happened to them. It did nothing to screen out those who had failed changing their orientation, but were motivated to lie about it by their religion to offer others hope that they could change.

There is no question these people were highly motivated to change. Their religion made them absolutely miserable about being gay. Over a third had seriously contemplated suicide over it. What the study failed to ascertain is whether anyone had experienced any real change. It was a bad study. It answered no interesting or even relevant questions.

Spitzer wrote in the conclusion of his original study, “the mental health professionals should stop moving in the direction of banning therapy that has, as a goal, a change in sexual orientation. Many patients, provided with informed consent about the possibility that they will be disappointed if the therapy does not succeed, can make a rational choice to work toward developing their heterosexual potential and minimizing their unwanted homosexual attractions.” He was the only mainstream psychologist making that claim, a claim he now retracts.

That leaves the anti-gay movement with no serious peer reviewed research to cite. Not that they will stop citing his original study, despite being repudiated by the author. His retraction of the study is important, because it pulls away the last vestige of scientific respectability to the reparative therapy movement.

Sexual orientation is not something that can be changed through therapy. Spitzer’s retraction puts the final nail in the coffin of one of the cruelest scams ever to be perpetrated on the desperate- men and women who were made desperate by the hate filled rhetoric of their fellow believer, the very same people who were pushing this sham therapy on them.

There have been many studies that show no link between abortion and mental illness, despite the repeated claims from anti-choice advocates. We looked at the issue at the end of last year back on the December 30th Sex and Science segment, where we talk about meta analyses. In that segment, we show the difference between good research and bad research. One of few studies to show an abortion mental illness link published in a major journal was in 2009.  It was roundly criticized when it came out. A new report in the February 2012 Journal of Psychiatric Research offers even more proof that the study does not stand up to scientific scrutiny.  The original study was done by Priscilla Coleman of Bowling Green State University in Ohio. It was not well received when it came out, and we reported on it negatively at the time. This latest analyses shows that Coleman and her colleagues  included mental health ailments not only after abortion, but all across the life span, making it impossible to know whether the psychological problems came before or after the procedure. In other words, a woman could have a mental breakdown at age 20 and an abortion at age 30, and it would be included as evidence for a link between abortion and mental illness. According to researcher Julia Steinberg, an assistant professor in the University of California, San Francisco’s department of psychiatry, “This is not a scholarly difference of opinion; their facts were flatly wrong. This was an abuse of the scientific process to reach conclusions that are not supported by the data. The shifting explanations and misleading statements that they offered over the past two years served to mask their serious methodological errors.” Coleman has admitted that she looked at lifetime mental illness rather than at mental illness that could conceivably be linked to abortion, and now claims that the study which has been so widely used by anti-choice forces never asserted that there was an abortion mental health link, ignoring the fact that the language of her study repeatedly claims such a link. The Journal that originally published Coleman’s paper comes down on the issue this way: “Based on our joint review and discussion of the debate, we conclude that the Steinberg-Finer critique has considerable merit and that the Coleman et al. (2009) analysis does not support their assertions that abortions led to psychopathology in the NCS data”. Case closed.

This 2009 study from the University of British Columbia is a little sad for Mitch Hedberg. In a test they showed sexy videos and the least sexy comedian they could find- Mitch Hedberg. Hedberg died in 2005, so he probably won’t take offense, and his comedy did contribute to science. The study was to see how well men could control their sexual responses. The men were told to control their responses to the videos, and as you might expect, most were able to control their mental and physical responses. The study found that the men who were best able to control their response to the pornographic videos were also able to control their response to Mitch Hedberg. Men who were more easily excited were less able to regulate; while guys who tended to be sexually inhibited because of performance issues were better able to prevent having an erection. Frankly, I do not know that this study tells us anything particularly interesting about sexual response, but it does tell us something important about comedy. Get your audience sexually turned on first, and they’ll laugh their asses off at your jokes. That is breakthrough science for those of us who try to make people laugh, and also explains why those horrible burlesque comics were able to get a response from the audiences. They were already turned on.

So, just how much skin should a woman expose to best attract a man? According to 2009 research at the University of Leeds, their scientifically derived number is 40%. These studies were done in clubs to see what got women the most attention. According to study leader psychologist Colin Hendrie, “Any more than 40 percent and the signal changes from ‘allure’ to one indicating general availability and future infidelity.” Or maybe it was sending the signal I am too hot for you and you don’t stand a chance with me. Other factors they considered included wearing tight clothes and dancing provocatively. And what was covered mattered. Bare midriffs got the most attention. They did not test to see how much attention bare butts and breasts got. Is it just me or does this seem like nonsense?

Independent scholar Anemone Cerridwen and her co-author Dean Simonton of the University of California at Davis did a study of 914 mainstream films to see if they did better at the box office with the inclusion of sex. Their results were published in the November 2009 issue of the journal Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity and the Arts. They concluded “Analyses of 914 films released between 2001 and 2005 indicated that sex and nudity do not, on the average, boost box office performance, earn critical acclaim, or win major awards.” They also believe it may have hurt the film’s chances for an Academy Award nomination or win.

I’d have to really go in depth on this study to know just how meaningful it is, but this does prompt some obvious responses. We aggressively rate any type of sex or nudity with an R rating, hence making it less available to a larger audience. These movies are seen as more adult, so fewer people will take their children. That means a smaller potential audience automatically. And I should mention that the highest grossing movie ever, Titanic, had a prominent nude scene. And it did pretty well at the Academy Awards.

The authors of this study state that what really sells is violence and not sex, which is sort of a sad commentary. The amount of violence in American films is magnitudes greater than the amount of sex, which is much less than what you find in European films. I wonder if scenes of violence were as harshly rated as sex scenes were if these conclusions might be very different.

Another factor that skews these results is that mainstream films just don’t generally have sex or nude scenes. Sure, teen comedies and similar lightweight fare do, and I suspect they do better at the box office than they would have without the nudity- since sometimes the nudity is the only thing in the movie. But they never will be Oscar contenders.

And the researchers used ScreenIt, the parents website for movie content reviews to set their criteria. I’m thinking they would have done better with Mr. Skin reviews that aren’t focused on children. Sure, they factored in ratings, but unless they only looked at R rated movies, I don’t think this was a level playing field. And I am quite a bit suspect that they are all that expert about the movie industry. They claimed that “sex is cheap with respect to production costs. Female actors can be hired for less than male actors, and can be urged (i.e. coerced?) into displaying more sexual nudity/activity; and for various reasons, sex scenes may be less expensive to shoot. And yet, mainstream cinema still can’t get an additional buck out of the practice.” This displays a stunning amount of ignorance about the movie industry. They are basing this on the notion that Male action stars do get paid more generally, but this is completely irrelevant. What actors get paid is largely a result of their perceived box office potential, not their gender. And A list stars are going to cost you a lot of money, male or female. And most of them don’t do nude scenes, no matter how much coaxing you do. In most movies, the nude scenes, which are often gratuitous and simply involve background performers doing things like dancing in a strip club, use unknowns. And those unknowns, male or female, are going to get SAG minimums most likely, plus a little extra for doing a nude scene. And when A list stars do nude scenes, it gets a lot of attention and probably helps box office. Swordfish was not a very good movie, but probably made more money because of the Halle Berry nude scene. And they had to pay her more money to do it- an extra half a million. When she appears nude, the movie is going to make more money. And she won Best Actress in Monster’s Ball, in which she also did a nude scene. And would anyone have gone to see Dancing at the Blue Iguana if not for the name nudity? So it is actually more about context. Who is the actor or actress appearing in the nude or sex scene? How well did the scene move the story along? And actually, shooting porn is relatively easy, but shooting a sex scene for a mainstream film is really complex. You have to worry about what might bump up your MPAA rating- something which is almost a black art but which could hurt your distribution. It is usually a difficult scene for the actors to do. These take far longer to shoot than just a scene of dialogue- or even a simple action scene that does not involve a lot of big explosions or complex choreography. And action scenes tend to be lengthy, whereas sex scenes in U.S. movies tend to be extremely brief- so it is impossible to compare the two. So, I suspect, based on the ignorance of these researchers about the movie business, that this study is not all that useful. Crappy action films that appeal to teen boys will generally make money, while higher quality and more artistic films with a little sex will generally have a smaller market- but the notion that producers will figure out that sex does not sell and stop using it is ridiculous. American Pie without any sex and nudity? What’s wrong with these people?

This is an excellent example of how biased supposed research organizations piggyback off of legitimate research by seriously distorting it. Here the research itself is not questionable, but the way it is falsely presented is. Here is the way the story was carried in the media: Researchers at Fordham University have released a study showing that homosexual men can change their “orientation” by developing healthy, non-sexual relationships with other men.

The study was published in the Journal of Men’s Studies (March 2010). Greg Quinlan, president of Parents and Friends of Ex-Gays & Gays told OneNewsNow it serves as confirmation to “everything that we’ve been saying all along. PFOX are not really friends of the gays, just friends of the ex-gays, which means their list of friends on Myspace is pretty small- and of course they are still using Myspace.

The results seem  highly improbable and contrary to just about everything we actually know about sexual orientation. Pair up gays with older ex-gays for fun and friendship and poof, everyone becomes heterosexual.

Pam Spaulding of the Pam’s House Blend site did a little digging and found that links to the actual study actually went back to the infamous National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality, the organization that the now infamous George Alan Rekers was heavily involved with. And wouldn’t you guess. The summary of the research on their site is a lie.

The actual research paper is titled “Sexual Orientation Change Efforts in Men: A Client Perspective”, in the Journal of Men’s Studies 18:1, Winter 2010. It looks at the psychological reasons men enter so called reparative therapy treatment, but it intentionally has nothing to say about the effectiveness of such treatment.  It never claims that such programs work. One of the key findings was that most men seek out such treatment because of religion. Not really a surprise, there. Nor did the study seek to discover how many of these male friends become friends with benefits.

A 2010 study from the University of Valencia makes an interesting claim about beautiful women. They are, essentially, a health hazard. Being around beautiful women, they claim, causes a spike in the stress hormone cortislol, at levels as high as jumping out of an airplane- something some guys have done just to impress a beautiful woman. Can I start ridiculing this now? They studied 84 male students, none of whom were apparently gay. They had to solve a Sodoku puzzle in the presence of a male or a female.  Left alone with the female, their cortisol levels went up, but not with the man. I saw nothing about how well they did with the Soduku puzzle, but there is an old Victorian game where you go into a private room with a member of the opposite sex and try to spell the word opportunity. Anyone who actually spends any time spelling the word rather than taking advantage of the opportunity gets mocked. It seems like this was more that type of test. Actually, the study does not show much of anything, other than sexual attraction produces cortisol. Does it work with women as well? What about gay men? Are they saying that it is safer  and less stressful for men to actually spend more time with the shy and plain researcher sitting alone in the corner?

The New York Times article on the research lead by Michael Bailey on bisexuality was headlined, “Straight, Gay, or Lying?” This title comes straight from page 96 of his “The Man Who Would be Queen” book, where he quotes it as a saying of gay men that validates his conjecture. Bailey believes that male bisexuality as an orientation does not exist. This has been misunderstood to say that bisexuality does not exist, but of course, ships and prisons put the lie to that. It is just not a sexual orientation- perhaps more a matter of convenience. Bisexual men are stigmatized in both the gay and straight communities for a variety of reasons. Now they are told they don’t even exist, a claim that is not new but now suddenly supposedly based hard science.

Bailey’s attempt to prove this used an appalling small sampling of just 104 men hooked up to a penile plethysmograph, a device which measures blood flow into the penis and is used to monitor arousal. While this has proved a useful tool, the APA notes that the reliability and validity of this procedure in clinical assessment have not been well established. In other words, without set standards, you have a lot of wiggle room in which to determine what is a meaningful result.

Of Bailey’s small sampling of just 104 men, just 33 of them were self-described as bisexual- so the core of his study is based on his results from just 33 men (sort of, as we’ll explain in a moment). There is no evidence that he took sexual histories from these men to determine where they fell on a scale of bisexuality, which going back to Kinsey we know can be widely different levels of attraction between the two sexes.

He had the men watch 2 minute videos of gay movies, and two minute videos of heterosexual sex. If the men got aroused during gay sex, they were gay. If they got aroused watching heterosexual sex, they were straight. If they got aroused to both, they were bisexual. In his results, 75 percent of the bisexuals were aroused only by the gay porn, and 25 percent only by the straight porn. So, since he believes that arousal is orientation, there is no such thing as bisexuality.

Except these figures aren’t even based on 33 bisexuals. 35 percent of participants in the study did not have measurable arousal at all to either the gay or straight videos. That left just 22 self-reported bisexuals that had measurable responses. So his entire conclusion is based on less than two dozen men.

And what about those who had no response? Since arousal is orientation, according to Bailey, does that mean that those who did not respond simply lack a sexual orientation?

The whole movie watching thing has a whole lot of problems. We don’t know his standards for determining arousal, and there are no set scientific standards using the plethysmograph. We also don’t know his protocols for choosing the videos. It has been reported that there were two movies of two men having sex and two movies of two women having sex. The later makes no sense. Is it assumed that all bisexual men get turned on by seeing two women together? If not, they are gay?

There are other possible explanations for his results. If most of your experience is straight, then would not viewing the less familiar or more forbidden homosexual content get more of a response? Most of us have seen far more straight content than homosexual. And just because you get aroused seeing something on video, which is in the realm of fantasy, does not mean that is something you want to do. How many straight girls get turned on watching girls together but have no interest in actually having sex with women? From my experience, quite a few. And what turns people on varies widely, as does porn. There are so many variables here that his results skew to the pointless.

Abortions are carcinogenic. The anti-abortion crowd has been making this argument for years, and it is still taught in many abstinence only education classes. Most specifically, abortions cause breast cancer. States such as Texas have even passed laws requiring doctors to tell women that abortions cause breast cancer.

In 2003, the National Cancer Institute brought together more than 100 of the world’s leading experts on the subject to review all of the existing research. Their finding was unequivocal: “Induced abortion is not associated with an increase in breast cancer risk.”

The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) Committee on Gynecologic Practice  reviewed the available evidence in 2009. The Committee said, “Early studies of the relationship between prior induced abortion and breast cancer risk were methodologically flawed. More rigorous recent studies demonstrate no causal relationship between induced abortion and a subsequent increase in breast cancer risk.”

The supposed link between breast cancer and abortions has long been debunked, but it hasn’t gone away. It is such a compelling and scary argument. Have an abortion and the chances are that you’ll have your breasts cut off or die. Its hard to find anything scarier to tell a young woman considering an abortion.

They have even published in anti-abortion literature the made up statistic that teens who undergo abortion “may face an eight times greater risk of contracting breast cancer by age 45.” This was in the pamphlet from the group A Woman’s Concern, an anti-abortion and anti-contraception group oddly enough headed by a male medical director. He was Eric Keroack, who then went on to become Bush’s choice at the Department of Health and Human Services to oversee family planning grants.

The problem was, the anti-abortion crowd has not had the science on their side. So they made some of their own. You wouldn’t know that at first hearing though. Here is a typical headline:
Abortion ‘Best Predictor of Breast Cancer,’ New Study Says
The story gets picked up very heavily in the conservative press. But you have to ask four simple questions. Who did the study? How was it done? Where was it published? And who paid for it? The answers to all of these questions are quite interesting. They take a little digging to discover, though.

First who did the study? One of the more reliable producers of this type of study is statistician Patrick Carroll of PAPRI in London. PAPRI stands for the Pension and Population Research Institute. They don’t even have a web site. As far as I can determine, they only have one employee: statistician Patrick Carroll. He is noted for complaining about Britain’s low birth rate and blaming it on the availability of contraceptives and women taking high level jobs. Hardly a disinterested researcher.

In 2001, PAPRI, under Carroll published a study that claimed that British breast cancer cases could rise by up to 60 percent in the next two decades due to abortion. This was soundly disputed by Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists. It was two years before the Cancer Institute’s publication of a complete debunking of the theory.

Not much has changed. Just like that study, his 2007 study linking cancer and abortion was funded by a British anti-abortion group.

Where was the 2007 study published? In the journal of the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons, under the title The Breast Cancer Epidemic. It sounds official, but it is actually published by an anti-vaccination anti-abortion group. Their general counsel is Andrew Schlafly, right wing son of Phyllis Schlafely. He is the founder of Conservapedia, a right wing, less fact based version of Wikipedia. He was featured in an expose on the July 4th edition of the Jeff Booth Show. On their web site, they have a resolution condemning abortion, which concludes “THEREFORE BE IT RESOLVED that the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons supports the right to life of human beings from the moment of conception to natural death. It does not rank high on the list of reputable medical journals, which is one of the reasons you don’t see this study quoted anywhere else in the medical literature.

Another reason is that it is statistically meaningless. This is known as a retrospective study. They look at old statistics and try and reinterpret them. The quality of the results depends entirely upon the quality of that reinterpretation and the mathematical model created. Except that the press release reveals that he is using the same old mathematical model from his 2001 study that was dismissed by the medical experts. It may be fiddling with numbers, but it is hardly science.

This is where it is important to understand how the study was done. Here is how it is described: The study examined data on abortion and breast cancer from 1971 through 2004 in eight European countries. Now, it sounds more like a medical study, tracing people who have had abortion through to later breast cancer. Actually, though, it is a statistical study. In these countries, they looked at the more affluent population that tended to have more money and a better lifestyle and better access to medical care and noted a higher incidence of breast cancer. Here is how he comes to the linkage, quoted from the press release: “Carroll suggests that the known preference for abortion in this class might explain the phenomenon. Women pursuing higher educations and professional careers often delay marriage and childbearing.” Might explain the phenomena? An increase in alien visitations might explain the phenomena as well. This is not science- this is wishful thinking by an ardent anti-abortionist. He didn’t look at people who had abortions and then had breast cancer. He looked at groups of people who had abortions, and then at groups of people who had breast cancer, and made the assumption that they had to be the same people, and that there was a causal relationship.

It gets even more ludicrous. He came up with things his backers wanted to be true as contributing factors and added them into the mix. Remember- the general trend of the group paying for this study is to encourage women to get married young and have children early and to oppose abortion and birth control. SO, not surprisingly, the risk factors they came up with include:

A low age at first birth is protective.
Childlessness increases the risk.

A larger number of children (higher fertility) increases protection.

Breastfeeding gives additional protection.

Hormonal contraceptives are conducive to breast cancer.

Hormone replacement therapy (HRT) is also conducive to breast cancer.

This study has been widely cited by anti-abortion groups all over the Internet. There is absolutely no science behind it. It is a rehash of an older repudiated study, with an additional laundry list of things to scare women into having children early, avoid abortion and birth control, and have lots of children.

The anti-choice movement continues to push the debunked link between breast cancer and abortion. It is typically part of the information women are given at Crises Pregnancy Centers.

There are sites like abortionbreastcancer.com filled with misinformation intended to frighten women out of having abortions. Because the science so strongly disputes this link, they even had to develop their own conspiracy theories about a massive coverup by the scientific and medical communities. They accuse medical journals and scientists of misrepresenting the data. Lancet and the National Cancer Institute are all part of the coverup, allegedly for ideological motives.It is all part of a massive deception funded by the hugely profitable abortion industry, just as the tobacco industry deceived Americans about the link between smoking and cancer. Or so the story goes. They even point to the Bioethics Journal Medics and Ethics, which has strongly criticized the coverup, although they fail to mention that it is not a medical journal, but a publication of the National Catholic Bioethics Center, which has a very strong anti-choice slant.

Patrick Carroll is not the only one pushing the Abortion Breast Cancer link. The leading proponent is probably Joel Brind,  a professor of biology and endocrinology at Baruch College. He came up with the catchy ABC term. He is strongly anti-choice and fought against the legalization of RU-486. He has published papers on human hormon topics in respected jopurnals, but he has never published anything even close to proof of his belief in the ABC link. His meta-analysis in the 1996 Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health was strongly criticized and essentially rejected by the medical community.  He founded the Breast Cancer Prevention Institute in 1999 with another anti-choice advocate.

Another strong advocate, although lacking in medical credentials, is Karen Malec. She is an anti0choice activist  who founded the Coalition on Abortion-Breast (CAB) in 1999 with help from Concerned Women for America,the conservative Christian U.S. political action group which has lobbied for years for legislation recognizing an abortion-breast cancer link, and forcing doctors to tell their patients about this alleged link.

The only organizations pushing this link are those that have an anti-choice agenda. The scientific community looks at the data, and has come to a very different conclusion:

National Cancer Institute findings on Breast cancer and abortion link