Comments on: We interrupt Cake Week for an important announcement

By: Historiann

Historiann — Thu, 13 Dec 2012 16:59:35 +0000

Thanks! I will put that on my Winter Break fun reading list. (I always find myself following all of your reading suggestions, TR, and they’re always fantastic! Plus, since even the serious histories are way out of my own field of research, I can just read them for fun and information and ideas without feeling the need to underline or take notes.)

By: Tenured Radical

Tenured Radical — Thu, 13 Dec 2012 16:40:56 +0000

I cannot recommend more highly Sara Dubow’s book Ourselves Unborn. It’s a history of the fetus, and it explains everything about these people.

By: Historiann

Historiann — Thu, 13 Dec 2012 15:43:48 +0000

No, KC–and in fact, if you look at Williams’s book, you’ll learn that there’s the possibility that some researchers are exploring that pregnancy in some women actually activates a particularly virulent strain!!!

She (Florence Williams) repeats without a shred of evidence the claim that breast cancer was rampant in convents. I’m sure that some other nun historians and I could pull together some data sets to examine this kind of thing, but I’m also thinking that death by breast cancer means that you dodged all of the other causes of death that claim most sexually active women until a relatively advanced age: childbirth, septicemia, infectious disease, etc.

In sum, there’s a lot that we don’t know about breast cancer, other than it’s an effective way to try to scare modern women who no longer have to face so much death by childbirth, septicemia, or infectious disease, etc.

By: hmprescott

hmprescott — Thu, 13 Dec 2012 14:37:39 +0000

Great post. So I don’t have to worry that I have a higher risk of breast cancer because I’ve never been pregnant?

By: Historiann

Historiann — Thu, 13 Dec 2012 03:52:24 +0000

Oh, yeah: the abortion causes breast cancer bullcrap. I remember seeing that on anti-abortion propaganda going back to the mid-1990s. IIRC, it was quickly debunked at the time, as it was based on problematic studies that were attempting to study whether or not pregnancy offered protection against breast cancer. (Short summary of the literature as I understand it: it may, especially if you are pregnant really young, but it likely doesn’t offer much protection if your pregnancy/ies is/are after age 30. See Florence Williams, Breasts: A Natural and Unnatural History (2011).)

But it doesn’t matter if this belief is actually confirmed by medical studies. It’s like the autism-is-caused-by-MMR-vaccine belief: people believe it because they want it to be true, and no amount of evidence or reasoning will convince them not to believe what they desperately want to believe.

By: Indyanna

Indyanna — Thu, 13 Dec 2012 01:23:47 +0000

oh, my god, as often, I should have googled first and commented second. I see that the Santorum camp has been all over this one, so I guess that explains everything. I had never heard or seen it, though.

By: Indyanna

Indyanna — Thu, 13 Dec 2012 01:20:59 +0000

There’s a house on a short street that I cut through walking on my way back home belonging to a pretty elderly couple whose garage door is always open, and it’s always filled with piles of “pro-life” stuff: signs, bumper stickers, tools, and vile, sloganeering things of a variety of sorts. People can think what they like as far as I’m concerned, but their car is all-but-assaultive in its relentless blaring projection of angry assertions and slogans. The latest one is a bumper sticker that says: “Abortion causes breast cancer.” So I was wondering, is this just the product of the latest round of delusional brain-storming at wherever this content comes from, or is there some kind of a pseudo-scientific meme along these specific lines going around out there?

By: Susan

Susan — Thu, 13 Dec 2012 00:23:15 +0000

It’s just tacky. That’s all. And I’m old enough that I don’t need history to know about coat hangers.