EDITORIAL- Despite state claims, no abortion-cancer link

States, pressured by anti-abortion activists, want to lie to women about abortion. Fourteen… States, pressured by anti-abortion activists, want to lie to women about abortion. Fourteen states have introduced legislation that mandates abortion clinics to mislead women seeking abortions about ties between having an abortion and an increased risk of getting breast cancer.

While there is no such risk — a 1997 study published in the New England Journal of Medicine concluded that, and additional studies have corroborated their findings — states have brought legislation that would require such a risk to be listed as one of the possible consequences of abortion.

Though Pennsylvania isn’t among the states with such a requirement, West Virginia and other nearby states are. This mismanagement of medicine threatens the right of all women to obtain the safe, legal abortions Roe v. Wade guaranteed.

Politics should never be allowed to eclipse science. With stem cell research and ever-controversial abortion as scaldingly hot-button issues, state legislatures should strike down these measures before they’re passed. Those that already require such fallacious warnings should strike them down too. Women — especially women choosing whether or not to terminate a pregnancy — deserve better than this.

Abortion is a litmus-test issue for many; Nov. 2’s “moral values” bloc proved that. And while there are arguments to be made for and against abortion rights, all sides should agree that women seeking abortions should receive the best and most scientifically accurate information.

Just as the Constitution mandates a separation of church and state, so too should there be a separation of politics and science, with the former not protruding into the latter.

What the states are doing is mandating malpractice. We’ve already got so many warnings plastered on everything from cigarettes to saccharine that we’re developing warning fatigue from the warnings that are true.

Adding false warnings — such as that cigarette smoking will cause you to grow a third limb or saccharine turns you into a pumpkin at midnight — isn’t only irresponsible, it’s fraudulent.

And with abortion, it’s misleading women in order to deprive them of their rights, in addition to, as our esteemed president put it, the rights of doctors to practice their love on women across the country.