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On 28 April 2017 President Donald Trump named Charmaine Yoest, former head of an anti-abortion group, as assistant secretary of public affairs for the United States Department of Health and Human Services. On 1 May 2017, claims appeared that Yoest's position on abortion encompass the discredited belief that terminating pregnancies cause breast cancer: Rumors about Yoest's position circulated on Twitter and Facebook in the wake of her appointment. The article cited a November 2012 New York Times profile in which Yoest erroneously asserted that abortion was a known cause of breast cancer: Since that 2012 interview, Yoest has not made that claim again that we could find. She testified at the confirmation hearings of Supreme Justices Elena Kagan and Sandra Sotomayor, and did not repeat the assertion in her testimony at either hearing. Although it is impossible to know for certain what Yoest truly believes about the alleged link between abortions and breast cancer, up until February 2016, Yoest was president and chief executive officer of Americans United for Life, a pro-life law and policy organization whose web site includes the claim: As the New York Times noted in 2012, the American Congress of Gynecologists and Obstetricians (ACOG) found in 2009 that rigorous studies demonstrated no causal relationship between induced abortion and a subsequent increase in breast cancer risk. As early as 2003, the National Cancer Institute said: The American Cancer Society maintains that rigorous and exceptionally broad data gleaned in Europe in the 1990s determines that after adjusting for known breast cancer risk factors, the researchers found that induced abortion(s) had no overall effect on the risk of breast cancer. We reached out to Yoest for comment, but have not yet received a reply.
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