Recent News Articles Featuring Mark Levine
Mark Levine was featured in several newspaper articles during his week at the 58th Conference on World Affairs. They are featured below. Unfortunately, the pictures were not re-produced on line. Audio from many of the ten panels on which Mark was invited to sit will later be featured on air.
Huge returns
Hey, Clueless, meet Bungling
Abortion activists speak to friendly crowd
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Huge returns
“Buying a member of Congress is a great form of investment.”
? Mark Levine, nationally syndicated talk-show host, during “Scandals and Dirty Tricks: The Best Democracy $$ Can Buy.”
Hey, Clueless, meet Bungling
“You know how you say Department of Homeland Security in Russian? … KGB”
? panelist Ron Wixman, doing some literal Russian translation during a Monday session on “Bungling Republicans, Clueless Democrats”
“Unfortunately I don’t think it’s the policy but perhaps the lack of charisma that’s hurting the party,”
? Mark Levine, commenting on the lack of leadership within the Democratic party during the same discussion
Abortion activists speak to friendly crowd
By Cara Pallone, For the Camera
April 11, 2006
Participants on a panel concerning the South Dakota bill outlawing abortion said they were disheartened by the new law.
The four speakers for “Get Your Hands Off My Body” delivered emotional stances at the Conference on World Affairs on Monday.
Carole Hillard, who served four years on the South Dakota state Legislature, focused on the question, “How far should lawmakers go in controlling people and their bodies?”
“The state Legislature is more conservative than they have ever been,” she said. “The majority of us are appalled, but even so, it passed.”
Mark Levine, host of the left-leaning syndicated radio talk show, “The Inside Scoop,” spoke next about self-harm, sex laws and the government making choices for others.
“People have the right to make their own mistakes,” Levine said. “The South Dakota bill is an egregious, awful bill.”
Panelist Leonard Shlain detailed in chilling detail the story of a friend who terminated her sixth pregnancy with a wire hanger. The woman developed gangrene in her uterus and died.
“I usually try to give a balanced view of things, but I don’t have a balanced view of the state trying to tell women what to do with their bodies,” Shlain said.
Levine and Ruth Oratz, an associate professor of clinical medicine, summed up the discussion.
“Something the pro-life and pro-choice advocates should come together on is encouraging contraception,” said Levine, to which the audience applauded.
Oratz said soon after, “We are all pro-life. There are some people who are anti-choice.”
Copyright 2006, DailyCamera. All Rights Reserved.
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Vicky May 19, 2006 10:43 pm
Bob, I agree with you 100% on the toxic environment and it’s link to breast (as well as other) cancer. I believe the type of diet people eat is also a factor, but I have seen too many studies on the abortion/breast cancer link not to make women aware of this connection.
If we want to talk about the factors that contribute to cancer, let’s not skip over the agents the medical profession uses to treat cancer – radiation and chemotherapy – both very toxic carcinogenic agents. Both have been shown to lead to secondary cancers.
Bob May 19, 2006 10:09 pm
We can make many speculations on why breast cancer has increased other than blaming abortions. There are any number of things that are correlated but not causally linked.
For example here are some speculations about a toxic environment leading to cancer:
http://www.innerself.com/Health/breast_cancer.htm
When it comes to environmental toxicity, carcinogens found in pesticides, herbicides, plastics, and other toxic chemicals that are known to cause cancer — especially breast cancer — there is booming silence by all Breast Cancer Awareness Month programs. Did the alarming increase of breast cancer rates just mysteriously happen? Or perhaps, the focus on the cure has conveniently ignored the cause? After, all it wouldn’t really be good PR for Zeneca to have it known that their chemical products directly contribute to the breast cancer epidemic.
Many experts predicted as far back as 30 years ago that cancer rates would increase, citing an explosion of synthetic chemicals. From 1940 through the early 1980’s, production of synthetic chemicals increased by a factor of 350.
Billions of tons of toxic substances that never existed are now released into the environment. Yet only 3 percent of the 75,000 chemicals in use have been tested for safety.3 These toxic time bombs are found in our water, air, and soil. Women who live near toxic waste dumps have 6.5 times the incidence of breast cancer.
A survey conducted by Dr. Mary Wolff of Mt. Sinai Hospital, New York found that women with breast cancer had four times the levels of DDE found in non-carcinogenic tumors.4 Also, another study investigated why upper class women in the community of Newton, Massachusetts had higher breast cancer rates than the lower economic women.5 The researchers attributed the increase to greater use of professional lawn care service and more dry cleaning.
Pesticides & Breast Cancer
The pesticide breast cancer link was stunningly highlighted in research from Israel which linked three organochlorine pesticides detected in dairy products to an increase of 12 types of cancer in 10 different strains of mice. After public outcry in 1978, the Israeli government was forced to ban the pesticides Benzene Hexachloride, DDT, and Lindane. Interestingly, breast cancer mortality rates which had increased every year for 25 years, dropped nearly 8 per cent for all age groups and dropped more than a thirty-three percent for women ages 25-34 in 1986.6
The American Cancer Society was founded with the support of the Rockefeller family in 1913. Members of the chemical and pharmaceutical industry have long had a place on its board. Could that have something to do with the fact that the American Cancer Society’s latest report on cancer prevention makes no mention of environmental factors?
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In the end, IMO the risk of breast cancer is not a serious factor in deciding the merits of abortion laws. But if a distraction from what is important is of interest then one might consider the last major review of the link between breast cancer and abortion came to a different conlclusion than the studies you report:
In February 2003, the National Cancer Institute (NCI) convened a workshop of over 100 of the world’s leading experts who study pregnancy and breast cancer risk. Workshop participants reviewed existing population-based, clinical, and animal studies on the relationship between pregnancy and breast cancer risk, including studies of induced and spontaneous abortions. They concluded that having an abortion or miscarriage does not increase a woman’s subsequent risk of developing breast cancer. A summary of their findings, titled Summary Report: Early Reproductive Events and Breast Cancer Workshop, can be found at http://www.cancer.gov/cancerinfo/ere-workshop-report .