Journalism, Bias and the Abortion Issue
Rocky Mountain News editorial writer and columnist Linda Seebach responds to the post below regarding bias at the Los Angeles Times (scroll down two posts to "The Perception - and the Occasional Reality") with comments about the original issue addressed in the leaked memo from LA Times editor John Carroll - whether there is credible medical research indicating a link between abortion and higher rates of breast cancer. Seebach:

I wrote a column about the main American study when it came out in 1994. I doubt it is suitable for posting now, because I'm sure there has been subsequent research, but I think the main thrust of it is as true as ever; if this issue has been slanted for political reasons, the pressure has been more from the left than the right.

The epidemiological importance, as estimated then, is for a particular risk group - girls in their teens who find themselves pregnant and wait more than 10 weeks to have an abortion are 2.5 times as likely as women at large to get breast cancer. That is a highly significant finding. It can be disguised by comparing all women who have had an abortion with all women, which is what opponents who deride this as "junk science" do, but in any other medical situation, researchers would not even consider.

The medical issue is not whether teenagers should have abortions but rather that if they are going to make that choice eventually it is a matter of life and death that they make it as soon as possible in the pregnancy.

Seebach's column, Abortion and breast cancer: The unmentionable relation, ran Nov. 6, 1994, edition of the Los Angeles Daily News. It is not available online.

That column examined press coverage of the release of a study in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute, by Dr. Janet Daling and other researchers at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, which estimated that the risk of breast cancer in those who had experienced an induced abortion was 50 percent higher than in other women, with the highest risks "when the abortion was done at ages younger than 18 years - particularly if it took place after 8 weeks' gestation - or at 30 years of age or older."

Wrote Seebach ten years ago: "The muted response, both by medical professionals and by the media, suggests that keeping abortion legal is a higher priority than informing women about the possible consequences of choosing to have one."

She noted that an editorial in the same issue of that medical journal said, "The overall results are far from conclusive, and it is difficult to see how they will be informative to the public." Also, noted Seebach, the New York Times, reporting on the study on Oct. 27, 1994, "did not see fit to print the views of anyone disinclined to offer these soothing reassurances."

That, despite other studies that hinted at a link between abortion and higher rates of breast cancer dating back as far as 1981. Wrote Seebach: "It has scarcely been mentioned in the media. I didn't hear about it until a year ago, when a friend gave me an article he'd received from an anti-abortion group that disseminates information over the Internet. The author noted that journalists he had talked to were very uncomfortable with the issue."

Understand, this post is not about abortion. Or breast cancer. This is about journalism. Reporters who let their political views cloud their coverage, who let being "uncomfortable with the issue" keep them from reporting all sides of the issue, have no business being reporters. I don't know where Carroll, the LA Times editor, stands on the abortion issue. But, thanks to his leaked memo, we do know where he stands on journalistic balance. The Carroll memo should have its own chapter in the journalism textbooks.