Politics

Trump's Health Secretary Nominee Tom Price Is Igniting Outrage

January 18th 2017

Amidst Wednesday's confirmation hearing for secretary of Health and Human Services-designate Tom Price (R-Ga.), the congressman's record of opposing abortion access is causing ripples on social media.


The congressman has backed numerous pernicious anti-abortion bills during his eleven years in office.

He co-sponsored bills in 2005 and 2007 that would have established life beginning at conception. These bills — which were introduced but never voted on — would have banned abortion and criminalized contraceptives like the pill and IUDs, according to the Daily Beast.

pregnant-bellyStocksy/Vera Lair - stocksy.com

In 2013 and 2015, Price voted for the Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act, which would have prohibited abortions after 20 weeks across the country.

Price also belongs to the the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons, which has promoted the unproven claim that abortion is linked to breast cancer.

"Scientists, women’s groups, and the media have consistently suppressed or ignored research that establishes a direct link between abortion and breast cancer for their own political purposes," a 2003 AAPS press release asserts. "Further, women considering abortion are not given true informed consent about the real risks of the procedure as a result of withholding this evidence." 

As the American Cancer Society points out, research has not demonstrated a causation relationship between abortion and breast cancer, the second most deadly cancer among women.

The unproven link recently popped up in a medically inaccurate pamphlet circulated by the Texas Department of State Health Services.

The National Cancer Institute conducted a comprehensive review of research on the alleged link in 2003 and concluded that there was no association between abortion and breast cancer risk. The NCI reaffirmed its findings in 2010.

In a 2003 committee opinion re-affirmed in 2009, the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists came to the same conclusion.

"Early studies of the relationship between prior induced abortion and breast cancer risk have been inconsistent and are difficult to interpret because of methodologic considerations," the ACOG writes. "More rigorous recent studies argue against a causal relationship between induced abortion and a subsequent increase in breast cancer risk.”

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