Transatlantic storm in a teacup

Abstract

Earlier this month an American paper was published in the United Kingdom indicating a link between induced abortion and breast cancer. Conspiracy theorists emerged in force on both sides of the Atlantic, but the contrast between the way the British and American press reported the paper could hardly have been greater. While the British press, for the most part, reported the findings with a dispassionate calm, the American press indulged in a blitz of antiabortion conspiracy theories that would have bemused even Machiavelli. It was this contrasting approach by the media in Britain and America that reportedly led the paper's author, Professor Joel Brind, to publish his research in a British journal which he assumed American medical reporters did not routinely read. So it was that …