If a doctor told you that it was possible to reduce your risk of cancer by 30% with a pill would you consider that negligible?

What if a doctor told you that taking a pill would increase your cancer risk by 30%? Would you be bothered by that?

My guess? You would probably want to take the former pill and avoid the latter because getting cancer would suck.

So I was struck by a news report about a study that showed that taking birth control pills increased the risk of breast cancer by 20-30%–and how the scientists and reporters characterized that increased risk as “small.”

It didn’t seem small to me. It seemed strikingly large. It’s not like breast cancer is terribly rare. 13% of women develop breast cancer in the United States. That’s a pretty big number. My wife got breast cancer. It was not a happy time for us.

All types of hormonal contraceptives carry a small increased risk of breast cancer, according to research establishing a link with progestogen pills for the first time.

The use of progestogen is associated with a 20-30% higher risk of breast cancer, data analysis by University of Oxford researchers has established. This builds on previous work showing that use of the combined contraceptive pill, which contains oestrogen and progestogen, is associated with a small increase in the risk of developing breast cancer that declines after stopping taking it.

About 42,000 women die from breast cancer every year, and about a quarter million women are diagnosed with the disease. That is a pretty significant number of women, and if you could cut that number by 20-30% I think most people would invest a bit of effort into doing so.

Does any of this mean that women shouldn’t use birth control? Of course not. We all make our own risk assessments based on costs and benefits, and I am in no position to tell women how to make this sort of choice as it effects only them.

Yet it is striking that the ideological commitment to the promotion of sexual “liberation” is so great that doctors and scientists, who will scream to high heaven about such dangerous increases in chances of death and disease, will downplay similar risks when it comes to birth control.

A 20-30% increase in risk is big, not small. It may not be big enough for some women to decide not to use birth control, but it sure should be big enough to give them second thoughts. Calling the risk increase “small” isn’t a statement of fact, but a value-laden adjective clearly intended to downplay something that is actually very significant.

To put this in perspective, millions of people take statins to reduce their risk of heart attack and stroke, at the cost of about $25 billion. The relative risk reduction for those taking statins compared with those who did not was 9% for deaths, 29% for heart attacks and 14% for strokes.

I am on very high doses of statins to reduce my cholesterol, and when my doctor told me that it reduced my chance of getting a heart attack by 30% it seemed like a no-brainer both to me and to her.

If we were talking about any other behavior save sexual liberation, the medical establishment would be pushing hard to reduce the use of these drugs due to the dangers posed.

But in the modern world anything having to do with sexual or gender freedom is exempted because, no matter the dangers involved, we should be encouraged to embrace our appetites.

We should rethink that. Sometimes a bit of restraint is a good and healthy thing.