From the desk of Wisconsin Family Action president, Julaine Appling:
Democrat National Committee Chairwoman and Planned Parenthood advocate Debbie Wasserman Schultz came to Wisconsin recently and made some horribly offensive comments about Governor Walker and some of his policies she doesn’t like. She focused on laws that, in her opinion, attack women.
This often fire-breathing Democrat leader referred to Governor Walker’s opposition to a minimum wage increase and his signing a bill into law that would prevent people bringing employment discrimination charges against an employer from seeking punitive and compensatory damages in state court. And she also mentioned the pro-life, pro-woman bills that Governor Walker has signed in the last three years. Clearly, Wasserman Schultz was trying to revive the ridiculous “war on women” idea that the liberals have been hammering on here and around the country for months.
I listened to these comments on the same day I read an article that was reporting on a recent released research study. The study, conducted by The Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center was published in the peer-reviewed Journal of Cancer Research. This unique research showed that the link between oral contraceptives and breast cancer in women may be greater than what previous studies have shown.
Essentially what the research found is that the less than one percent of women taking what is known as a contemporary “high-dose” oral contraceptive are 270% more likely than women who are not using oral contraceptive to develop breast cancer. The 78% of women taking a “moderate-dose” are 160% more likely to develop breast cancer than were women who were not taking the pills. And the 24% of women on a “low-dose” contraceptive showed no greater likelihood of developing breast cancer. Overall according to the report, “compared with the control group, the women who had used birth control pills in the previous year had a 50 percent higher risk overall than women who had either never used the drugs or had used them in the past.”
If the Planned Parenthood-affiliated Guttmacher Institute is right, then over 10 million American women use birth-control pills—in other words, oral contraceptives. The study dealt with women ages 20-49, which, of course, would be the primary ages of women taking these pills. So what this means is millions of women in the prime of life are directly impacted by this research.
But what has been Planned Parenthood’s and mainstream media’s response to this research about the second leading cancer among women in America? Not surprisingly, but truly alarming, as near as I can see Planned Parenthood hasn’t even mentioned the research; and the media has dangerously misrepresented it, trying hard to tell women there’s absolutely nothing to worry about.
Most stories reported the good news for the 24% of women in the control group who took low-dose oral contraceptives showed no greater likelihood of developing breast cancer, and then went on to say that while the risk is significant for the less than one percent of women taking the high-dose pills, no one should worry about that since so few women take the pill in that form.
What they blatantly did not report was that 78% of women in the control group took the moderate-dose pills. Also significant is that some research shows that most women do not know what dose of oral contraceptive their physician has them on. They also don’t bother to report that overall, the women in the control group taking oral contraceptives were collectively 50% more likely to develop cancer than those who weren’t. Now that is a war on women.
The bulk of the mainstream stories don’t even bother to report that a spokesman for the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists said, “Talk to your provider about the type of birth control you’re using and make sure it meets your needs in light of this new information.” No warning. Nothing. Just a concerted effort to mislead and thereby deprive women of information that can literally be life-saving. That is reprehensible and despicable.
Wasserman Schultz and others of her ilk are the ones waging the war on women. If they were honest and were truly concerned about women and their health, they would be doing everything they could to get the findings of this study out instead of making absurd allegations about Wisconsin’s governor.
