If a scientist discovered a risk factor that increases the chance of breast cancer by 30 percent, you'd have thought it would have spurred huge headlines and impassioned demands for action.

With the exception of AIDS, no other health issue has been as politicized as breast cancer. Yet as scientists zero in on what one called the single most avoidable risk factor for breast cancer, barely a peep has been heard for more research, more funds or more information.

That's because the risk is abortion.

Ten out of 11 studies show that American women who have had an abortion face an increased risk of breast cancer. In eight of the studies, the risk is statistically significant.

Last year, Joel Brind, a profession of biology and endocrinology at New York's Baruch College, and his fellow researchers at Hershey Medical Center of Penn State University, published a meta-analysis of worldwide studies of the abortion-cancer link. It concludes that an abortion elevates a woman's overall risk of developing breast cancer by 30 percent. The study, published in the British Medical Association's Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health, found a link related to first-time abortions, regardless of timing. The results were "remarkably consistent" across population, ethnic, dietary, socioeconomic, and lifestyle factors. The link could account for thousands of cases a year, and as the first cohort of women exposed to legal abortion comes of age, the impact could grow.

In two weeks, Brind will tell the First World Conference on Breast Cancer in Canada that additional studies support his findings.

Brind isn't alone. Studies as early as 1957 began showing the link. In 1994, Janet Daling of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center discovered a similar link. Brind is pro-life and Daling is pro-choice, but what they have in common are the attacks by pro-choice activists, biased bureaucrats and ideological scientists. Both are accused of trying to restrict women's choices.

Sadly, to find an audience, Brind must turn to pro-life groups, rather than those advocating women's health. After attending [National Right to Life's] conference in Oak Brook [Illinois] last week, a frustrated Brind described to me the effort to ignore, even silence, research supporting the link.

He pointed to a 1988 Australian study on breast cancer that omitted data on women who had abortions. That data came to light in a 1995 British Journal of Cancer paper that reported a 160 percent increased risk of breast cancer among women who had an abortion. Seven years of political influence, he said, had silenced research that showed abortion is a greater risk factor than a family history of breast cancer.

Brind also cites a recent study of 1.5 million Danish women that, said its author, "definitely" settles the issues, disproving the link between abortion and breast cancer. Brind, in a detailed response published in the current New England Journal of Medicine, called the Danish study flawed because it, among other errors, misclassifed 60,000 as having had no abortions when they actually had.

In a letter to appear in the August Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health, Brind responds to critics of his work when they argue results such as his ought to "be treated with caution."

"But," Brind asks, "Caution in regard to what? Or to whom? Are they not aware that induced abortion is overwhelmingly an elective procedure? Would not caution in regard to proper patient care demand acknowledgment of the preponderance of available evidence that abortion is not only a risk factor, but the most avoidable of risk factors for breast cancer?

"Indeed, what perversion of standards of informed consent and patient care could place ethics and harmlessness on the side of withholding such knowledge from the very women who must live (or die) with the choices they make regarding abortion?"