Mom With Breast Cancer Who Rejected Abortion While Pregnant is Now Cancer Free

by Steven Ertelt, LifeNews.com, 1/30/15

Heather Choate found out she had breast cancer while 10 weeks pregnant with her sixth child. When she met with her doctor to discuss what to do, her physician told the 29-year-old from Bayfield, Colorado to have an abortion and get treatment because she woud die otherwise. But Choate said she would rather die than take the life of her own child.

Choate however said she would rather die than get rid of her baby, she found a doctor who gave her some chemotherapy and surgery, and on January 6 gave birth to a daughter, Kiery Celeste.

Now, heather has been given the news that she’s cancer free.

“I just got tears really in my eyes because that means we’ve done it — we have a baby here and things are looking good,’ Choate told CBS Denver.

Here’s more:

Dr. Virginia Borges at the University of Colorado Hospital was ready to fight. She’s an expert on breast cancer care for young women. Heather had both chemotherapy and surgery while pregnant.

On a day in late January Borges met the children, including Kiery Celeste who born healthy on Jan. 6, with news about their mom. “The scans are perfect,” Borges told them.  The children don’t quite understand, but it meant Heather is cancer free.

“I just got tears really in my eyes because that means we’ve done it — we have a baby here and things are looking good,” Heather said. There is both chemotherapy and radiation ahead, but nothing the Choates can’t handle with good medicine, family and faith.

Studies show women don’t need to have an abortion and can safely seek chemo treatment during pregnancy.

LifeNews, in April 2012, covered a collection of stories from The Lancet, a prominent British medical journal, showing pregnant women don’t need to have an abortion in order to get treatment for cancer. The information shows chemo treatment does not harm the unborn baby and mothers can treat themselves for cancer without worrying about effects on the unborn child.

In 2009, LifeNews.com reported on a new study showing doctors don’t need to suggest an abortion to pregnant women who want cancer treatment. The study involved a concept called pregnancy associated breast cancer — breast cancer that is diagnosed when a woman is pregnant or within a year after delivery.

The mainstream media highlighted the study as if it showed a new concept, somehow finally dismissing the notion that pregnant women undergoing breast cancer treatment should have an abortion. But Dr. Joel Brind, a Baruch College professor says studies have shown that for decades.

“Actually, this finding has been reported many times in the last 15 years,” Brind explained.

“Unfortunately, many doctors still recommend abortion for women diagnosed with breast cancer while pregnant, so that they can treat the cancer more aggressively. This is despite worldwide research going back as far as the 1930’s that shows that so-called ‘therapeutic abortion’ substantially shortens lifespan, whereas carrying the pregnancy to term makes long-term cure more likely,” he said.

Brind says that a 1976 review of all studies published to that point, conducted by French doctor P. Juret, reported that, “The futility of therapeutic abortion is now certain.”

Although the study isn’t the revelation the mainstream media claimed, Brind says it is quite useful.

“What the new story out of MD Anderson shows is that women in this particular situation — which are only about 3% of all breast cancers — have no worse a prognosis than women with the same stage of breast cancer who are not pregnant,” he said.

“But what is most important about the current report is the absence of any data about abortion, i.e., a difference in prognosis as a function of whether or not the pregnant patient aborts the baby,” he explained. “To their credit, doctors at MD Anderson have, for at least the last several years, been very good at treating both patients: Mom and her unborn child.”

“Hopefully, the current report will be yet another nail in the coffin of ‘therapeutic abortion,’” he told LifeNews.com.

 

http://www.lifenews.com/2015/01/30/mom-with-breast-cancer-who-rejected-abortion-while-pregnant-is-now-cancer-free/