LAST MARCH 25 FOUND THE TEMPERATURE IN FARGO, NORTH DAKOTA, hovering around 5 degrees, with knee-high snowdrifts in the business district. But the late spring freeze was nothing compared to the icy barbs traded inside the town's turn-of-the-century courthouse. There, anti-abortion activists had unleashed their newest weapon: a controversial theory contending that a woman who has an abortion increases her risk for breast cancer.

Scientists at organizations including the National Cancer Institute, the World Health Organization and the American Cancer Society have reviewed the claims and declared them flawed. "The available evidence just does not justify the conclusion that there's a causal association between abortion and breast cancer," says Eugenia Calle, Ph.D., director of analytic epidemiology at the ACS. In more than a dozen states, abortion opponents are nonetheless pushing for laws requiring clinics to disclose the alleged link. So far, they've succeeded in Mississippi and Montana.

"When anti-choice activists aren't able to outlaw abortion, they come up with ways to frighten women," says Gloria Feldt, president of Planned Parenthood Federation of America in New York City. "They don't have the facts on their side, so they resort to lies."

In 1999, Fargo's Red River Women's Clinic produced a brochure stating that research did not support claims of a link between abortion and breast cancer. Calling the brochure misleading, Amy Jo Kjolsrud, a 26-year-old pro-life activist, filed suit against the facility for false advertising. Her goal: to make the clinic tell women they'd be better protected against breast cancer if they skipped their scheduled abortions and gave birth instead.

Only about two dozen observers witnessed the courtroom drama, but the trial had surprisingly high stakes. A victory for the anti-abortion side could set a legal precedent and provoke a spate of similar lawsuits. It would also feed a growing national campaign to advertise the purported link on everything from bumper stickers to websites to a billboard on wheels hired to drive alongside thousands of breast cancer awareness marchers in Colorado.

The science behind the scare

The leading advocate of the abortion-breast cancer link is a man named Joel Brind, Ph.D., a biochemist who teaches at the City University of New York's Baruch College. At the Fargo trial, he testified that hormonal changes during pregnancy give women special protection against breast cancer; if a woman has an abortion, she forfeits that protection.

Brind explains his hypothesis this way: Before a woman conceives, she has a small number of immature cells lining the ducts of her breasts. During pregnancy, these cells multiply until, eight weeks before childbirth, they become milk-producing. When a woman has an abortion, she's left with an abundance of immature cells in her duct linings. Those cells are more likely to become cancerous than the mature cells would have been, or so the theory goes.

Over the years, various studies have tested this premise, and in 1996, Brind published a meta-analysis of them in the British Medical Association's Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health. He concluded that women who have abortions are 30 percent more likely to develop breast cancer than those who don't. Scientists call this a relative risk of 1.3, meaning that instead of the expected 110 out of 100,000 women getting breast cancer each year, 143 women would. Though other scientists have come to different conclusions based on the same data, Brind says that "the National Cancer Institute and the American Cancer Society and top journals like the New England Journal of Medicine are basically collaborating in a cover-up."

When lawyer John Kindley, an activist on this issue, read Brind's analysis, he spun a legal argument: Doctors and clinics that don't warn patients about a breast cancer risk could be ruled negligent. Kindley suggested that Kjolsrud file her suit and agreed to help represent three activists who sued Planned Parenthood of San Diego. The latter case was dismissed as groundless last March-the same month the Fargo case reached the courtroom.

Disproving the cancer connection

Two days after Brind testified in Fargo, the clinic's attorneys called Julie Palmer, Sc.D., to the witness stand. An epidemiologist at the Boston University School of Medicine, Palmer said even if studies did claim an average relative risk of 1.3 for breast cancer in women who've had abortions, there are strong reasons to discount those findings. Smokers are 20 times more prone to lung cancer than nonsmokers-a solid link. But when the relative risk is only 1.3, she said, there's often an explanation other than cause and effect: A woman with cancer, anxious to find clues to her illness, is more apt to disclose to researchers any medical condition or procedure she's had, even an abortion. "Though abortion is legal," Palmer said, "women don't want to admit to some stranger that they had one."

In 1997, the New England Journal of Medicine published by far the largest study on the issue, one that for Dr. Palmer and other epidemiologists quickly became the authoritative word. Scientists followed 1.5 million women born in Denmark between 1935 and 1978. Because doctors report all abortions in Denmark to the government, there was no danger that women hadn't disclosed them. The conclusion? "Abortions have no overall effect on the risk of breast cancer," the researchers wrote. (Brind characterizes that work as "totally invalid" and flawed in its methodology.)

What about the immature cells theory? Researchers say it's based on 20-year-old studies on rats that haven't been replicated in humans. Besides, they say, seeking a biological mechanism when the numbers don't suggest a risk is practicing science in reverse. Brind maintains the data "clearly show there's a link."

"People opposed to abortion are unhappy that there is no effect, so they concoct elaborate schemes to explain why there should be an effect," says David Grimes, M.D., a vice president of Family Health International, a public health research group in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina. "It's a perversion of how science works."

The next front in the abortion wars

In the 24 hours before the verdict was announced, Brind extolled Judge Michael McGuire's fairness to reporters and predicted a victory. His optimism proved unfounded. "When evidence is inconsistent, one cannot say that there is a direct link," the judge said, ruling for the clinic. The decision won't become official legal precedent until a higher court has weighed in, and Kindley said an appeal is imminent.

Meanwhile, the conflict rages on outside the court, as anti-abortion activists appeal directly to the public. After a judge dismissed the San Diego suit, a California group rushed to release a television spot that aired throughout the state. In it, a female narrator intones, "I have breast cancer. And learned that the abortion I had when I was 17 was a major risk factor. I want to let other women know, because I would have given anything to have known." Other activists have posted highway billboards in Missouri, New Jersey and Pennsylvania and plastered warnings in transit stations and on public buses in Northeastern cities. At the same time, anti-abortion legislators continue to push for "disclosure" laws. So far this year, Missouri, New Jersey, Oklahoma, Rhode Island and West Virginia have all introduced bills requiring that women seeking abortions be warned about breast cancer. "Already people in Montana and Mississippi are getting this misinformation," says Barbara Brenner, executive director of Breast Cancer Action in San Francisco. "Who's next? It could be coming to a doctor's office near you."

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