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Keri explains if the risk for breast cancer increases if a woman engages in fertility treatments.
Keri:
Studies that were told to us said that no, it didn’t make us more prone, didn’t make me more prone to developing breast cancer, and the studies that I look at today still show that there is no correlation between an increased risk of breast cancer, even ovarian cancer. However, the studies that I did see, they were short-term studies. You also have to look at who those studies were done by, and we were thinking long-term.
So when somebody told me yes, my increased risk of breast cancer, there wasn’t an increase by me taking all these drugs, I just didn’t believe it was true. I didn’t believe that there was enough information and enough studies out there to really make me feel comfortable with accepting that that is true.
And, the other thing I could not understand, and maybe there is some information out there is, there is an increased risk of taking hormone replacements during a time of menopause, then why isn’t there an increased risk of taking hormones to get pregnant? So that was my kind of, our thought.
We felt as though that the fertility industry, in general, is a big money-making industry. The drugs, companies make, it’s a billion-dollar industry. They make a lot of money. There’s a lot of competition among fertility clinics, especially in states where insurance covers it 100% like the state that we were in, Massachusetts. In other states where insurance doesn’t cover it, people self-pay. It is an extremely emotional process to go through, and people would pay anything to become pregnant, and we thought about all of that stuff, and it just didn’t sit well with us that when it is such a huge money-making industry and when you have a group of doctors that self-govern themselves from what we heard, it just kind of put a red light, a red flag up to say, “Hmm, maybe there isn’t a lot of long-term studies out there because they don’t want there to be.” That’s what we were, we don’t know if that’s necessarily true or not, but that was kind of what we were thinking, and that played into the decision that we didn’t want to go forward with it.
I also, like I said before, that I didn’t want to look back 20 years from now and say, or 10 years from now and say, "I got breast cancer because of the drugs that I took." If I got breast cancer because of my family history or because of other reasons, I would be okay with that, but if there was some correlation between the drugs that I took and developing breast cancer, that would really make me feel bad, awful.
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