Are IUDs Giving People Breast Cancer?
Why the data isn’t nearly as scary as the headlines suggest.
If there’s one thing that the media loves, it’s a story about how standard healthcare for women is secretly dangerous and bad. This is a trope I’ve been writing about for nearly a decade now. One of my first blog posts back in 2016 was on a misleading story about the contraceptive pill causing depression. I’ve written several times about the false belief that abortion causes all sorts of long-term health issues, which comes up every time a right-wing group wants to ban healthcare for women.
This time, the story is that hormonal intrauterine devices — IUDs — are causing breast cancer. There have been a wave of headlines implying that anyone using an IUD faces a worrying increased risk of developing the nasty condition in the future.
But the data is not nearly so strong. In fact, the evidence suggests that there isn’t much to be worried about at all.
Cancerous Claims
The study itself was a recent short research letter published in the Journal of the American Medical Association. This is a type of scientific article with a very limited word count and few references — in this case, the letter was just 758 words in total. The authors described a study based on the Danish…
