The Protective Effects of Childbirth
Can childbirth actually benefit women's health? A look at the healthy effects of having children.

The Post-Abortion Review
Vol 9, No 2, Apr-jun 2001
Amy R. Sobie
Elliot Institute
Reproduced with Permission

One of the population controllers' favorite techniques is to portray pregnancy as dangerous, burdensome and demeaning to women. Some have labeled it an "epidemic," or a "disease."(1) At a Planned Parenthood conference, for example, one speaker described abortion as an "effective treatment" for "the number two sexually transmitted disease" -- unplanned pregnancy.(2)

But population control zealots have failed to prove that pregnancy is, in fact, harmful to women. Indeed, a number of studies point to the opposite conclusion: that pregnancy generally benefits women's health. Yet these studies have been virtually ignored by the medical community and the secular media. According to researcher Thomas Strahan:

One relatively unexamined issue is the important role that childbirth and lactation play in the overall health of a woman. The failure of the body to experience these events appears to cause malfunctions which frequently result in health problems later in life, including possible increased risks from various types of cancer.(3)

As this article will show, full-term pregnancy has been shown to reduce women's risk of disease, improve their mental health and improve the outcome of their future pregnancies.

Reducing the Risk of Cancer

According to national health statistics, approximately one in eight American women will have breast cancer in her lifetime. Each year, an estimated 175,000 women are diagnosed with breast cancer, and 43,500 women die from it.3 These numbers have led in recent years to a nationally-publicized campaign to educate women on breast cancer prevention and treatment.

What is seldom -- if ever -- emphasized in public discussions on preventing breast cancer is the fact that having a full-term pregnancy has been linked to a decrease in breast cancer risk -- the earlier the better. A major study of 250,000 women from around the world found that those who have their first child by age 18 have only about one-third the risk of breast cancer faced by women whose first birth occurs at age 35 or later.(4)

Another large study published in 1989 by the Centers for Disease Control examined data from eight population-based U.S. cancer registries and found that lactation also plays a role in reducing breast cancer. The more children a woman had and the longer the duration of breast-feeding after birth, the lower her risk of developing breast cancer.(5)

Pregnancy and childbirth have also been linked to two other diseases that affect women: ovarian and endometrial cancer. Studies have shown that women who have never had children are twice as likely to develop ovarian cancer -- which takes the lives of about 14,000 American women each year -- compared to those who have given birth.(6) As with breast cancer, the more full-term pregnancies a woman had, the lower her risk of ovarian cancer.(7)




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