Pacific Rim Bureau (CNSNews.com) - The settlement of a legal case based on claims that abortion can heighten the risk of breast cancer could help a pro-life drive to win wider acknowledgement that such a link exists, thus contributing to a drop in the number of abortions.

That is the view of Babette Francis, head of a pro-life women's organization in Australia, whose lawyer husband represented the woman involved in the lawsuit.

Attorney Charles Francis said last week an abortionist had agreed to settle with his client, who sued the doctor for not warning her beforehand about the possible psychological damage of abortion, or telling her about research findings linking abortion to breast cancer.

It was believed to be the first case of its kind in the world, he said.

Pro-abortion groups, along with some medical bodies, deny that having an abortion can increase a woman's chances of contracting breast cancer. Warning women in advance, they argue, is unnecessary and will merely add to stress at what is already a difficult time.

But the U.S.-based Coalition on Abortion/Breast Cancer says 28 out of 37 studies published since 1957 have established a link and that this fact should be made available to women considering an abortion.

Babette Francis, national and overseas coordinator of the Endeavour Forum - an Australian affiliate of the coalition - said her group had been campaigning on the cancer-abortion link for the past two years.

Already it had witnessed some advances, she said. Where once leading anti-cancer organizations had denied any link existed, some were now "back-peddling," preferring to say that research in the field was inconclusive.

"They're shifting their ground -- now they're saying it cannot be supported or denied, or that no definitive statement can be made," Francis said.

A handout to clinicians by the Anti-Cancer Council of Australia reads: "Current epidemiological evidence does not allow any definitive statements on the association between breast cancer and spontaneous or induced abortion."

An item on its website says: "It has been suggested that abortion causes an increased risk of breast cancer, however, studies to date have been inconclusive."

And in a letter to a British medical body, a representative of the Queensland (Australia) Cancer Fund said its own view was "that we can neither support nor deny the linkage."

Francis said since breast cancer is a potentially fatal and always mutilating disease, Australian doctors' failure to tell women that they had reached a conclusion of neither supporting nor denying a cancer-abortion link was simply "not good enough."

In Britain, too, experts seem unwilling to state unequivocally that there is no link between abortion and breast cancer. In its guidelines on abortion, the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists says: "Available evidence on an association between induced abortion and breast cancer is inconclusive."

Dr. Thomas Stuttaford, medical columnist for The Times, argued in 2000 that there was no causative link. Last May, however, he wrote another column changing his stance, saying: "Breast cancer is diagnosed in 33,000 women in the UK each year; of these an unusually high proportion had an abortion before eventually starting a family. Such women are up to four times more likely to develop breast cancer."

But while some specialists appear to be moving away from outright denial, the American Cancer Society seems to have shifted in the opposite direction. A fact sheet produced earlier by the society, quoted on the Coalition on Abortion/Breast Cancer website, said that abortion "may be associated with increased breast cancer risk."

That was in 1996. The society subsequently asked the coalition to remove the reference, stating its current view as: "There is no evidence of a direct relationship between breast cancer and spontaneous abortion [miscarriage] in most of the studies that have been published."

Francis said it was her hope that publicity surrounding arguments about a link between abortion and breast cancer would help reduce the number of abortions in Australia - that women would "bypass the anti-cancer organizations and make their own choices."

According to Dr. Joel Brind, an American authority on the abortion-breast cancer link, a 1988 study on Australian women found that abortion was a greater risk factor for breast cancer than any other known factor, including a family history of breast cancer.

The main focus of the study was on dietary risk factors, and the finding regarding abortion was never made public at the time.

Only seven years later, in a paper published in a British medical publication, did the unpublished material emerge, and it revealed a 160 percent increased risk of breast cancer among Australian women who had had induced abortion.

Activist groups such as the Endeavour Forum and the Coalition on Abortion/Breast Cancer argue that such findings have been suppressed because the pro-abortion lobby does not want to accept that abortions are not as safe for women as they have maintained.