This is a followup to my comments about poor social science and propaganda. I’m working on something else, but found an meta analysis of adverse outcomes for abortion. The authors found thirty studies, and the preponderance of data indicates that terminating your pregnancy is bad for your emotional health. I’ve removed the references from this part of the paper: there is no link in the quote because I had to go through a paywall to get this. The reference is Psychiatry Clin Neurosci 2013: 67(5); 1440 -1819 http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/pcn.12067
Clinical depression is present in 17% of women who give birth to a living baby and in 26% of those who abort. Depression and bipolar disorder were present in 43.2% of women who miscarried, in 45.5% of those who had an abortion, in 28.7% of those who gave birth and in 25.1% of never pregnant women. A minority of studies did not find a significant difference between abortion and live birth, but one gave only risk ratios; only in the study on fetal reduction, did the authors give depression rates: 15% after fetal reduction and 15% in the control group who gave birth to a healthy baby, but fetal reduction is a special type of abortion, because it is balanced by the birth of the surviving fetus. Women enrolled in that study, whose selective reduction provoked the death of all fetuses, had a depression rate of 75%, while those who aborted (control group) had a depression rate of 60%. With regard to anxiety, one study showed that 10 days after the event, 47.5% of the women who had a miscarriage had high Impact of Event Scale scores, compared with 30% for women who had an induced abortion. The corresponding values after 2 years were 2.6% and 18.1%, respectively. Another study that compared term childbirth and abortion found that after 14 months, relevant psychiatric diagnoses were present in 0% and in 16.7% of women, respectively. Cougle et?al. found clinical anxiety in 10.1% of unintended pregnancies, versus 13.7% in the abortion group (P< 0.005).
I do not consider the feelings, even the rate of depression, among women who have an abortion the correct measure of their effectiveness. I think this is a false measure: the correct measure is a moral one about considering the babe less important than the inevitable inconvenience of bearing a child. Particularly as the Abortion mill that is Planned Parenthood sees fetal material as a profit centre.
I knew a girl training in Ob/Gyn that did a rotation as an abortionist. Caused her to switch her specialty as the raw monetary inducement and unnecessary procedures/intense manipulation to gain more “clients” spoke against her crunchy liberal sympathies. If she had wanted that life, she would have sold pharmaceuticals. Honestly, the topic is so ghastly, and the behavior of the butchers and buyers on those leaked videos so deranged, that the depravity transcends ethics and morality, and becomes an issue that ought to be discussed from all these angles. Even the most die-hard pro-choice nutter is hard pressed to celebrate the sale of baby parts for profit, and that’s what I took to be the point of the original article. We should make hay and start talking about this while it’s a hot topic, and do it tactically so as to have our enemies fighting among themselves.
Locally, you can opt out of doing abortions by saying it is against your conscience. It is an ugly business: many obstetricians I know do precisely that, Atheists included.
The idea that a termination can be done for the mental health of the woman is a legal nonsense. I’m fully aware that the certifying consultants (you need two of them to sign off a termination) use this as the most frequent justification for an abortion in NZ: in NZ abortion is not a constitutional right: we don’t really have a constitution. But it is a legal lie: and the science we have does not support it.
