“Thank God that someone cared for us when we were too small to care for ourselves.” So how many single parents and poor parents are you supporting? How much money are you giving to needy children? How many children have you adopted and how many foster children are living with you in your home right now? How many women’s medical bills (for carrying a fetus to term) have you paid for? Finally, give me your contact info– if I ever get pregnant, I will send all my bills to you since you are so hell bent on “protecting lives.” Or is that not what you meant? Maybe you don’t actually care about other humans, just want to ruin women’s lives with unwanted pregnancies?? (I’m not even going to touch your tenuous grasp of biology.)

I don’t know you personally, but your desire to “protect lives” is meaningless and pernicious unless you are doing all the things I mentioned above.

Kiwi

There are a couple of points that I’d like to address about mental health. First, abortion and people’s personal experiences of abortion are absolutely connected to and can impact their mental health. Mental health is a concept which seeks to define how we deal with our lives, emotionally and cognitively. We may cope well with an abortion, or we may not, both responses are a gauge of our mental health. Wikipedia has a great definition: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mental_health

What the Harvard literature review and other similar literature reviews point out is that there has been no perfect-sciency study done that provides real evidence that there is a direct correlation between abortion and mental ILLNESS, or a psychological disorder. Which also doesn’t mean one doesn’t exist, it just means no study has shown it to exist.

As the Founder and Executive Director of Exhale, http://www.4exhale.org, what we think is most important to understand about the emotional experience of abortion, is that frankly, there is one. And that emotional well-being is possible for every woman who has had one and her loved ones.

The spectrum of feelings that women and men can have after an abortion – from relief and empowerment to grief and sadness – all deserve to be heard and supported. The presence of normal, natural human emotion does not in fact predetermine mental illness. Quite the opposite, in fact. A person’s ability to identify and cope with their feelings around an abortion experience is a very positive action and one that puts them in charge of promoting their own emotional health.

Exhale believes that more research needs to be done to better understand the emotional experience of abortion and the kinds of strategies women can use to promote their own well-being. That is why we advocated that the NIH do more research on this topic and are proud to be a partner with the Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health program at UCSF that has launched a series of new studies to do just that. You can learn more about our NIH advocacy here: http://aspenbaker.wordpress.com/2009/05/22/the-science-of-support-why-we-need-research-that-promotes-well-being-after-an-abortion/ and about ANSIRH’s work here http://www.ansirh.org/research/aspects.php

The current social climate around abortion is definitely not the most conducive environment to a woman’s wellbeing after an abortion. And yet, we know from listening to women on our talkline, that they have everything they need to be well after an abortion. The best each of us can offer is to listen and be a witness to their unique story.

A whole, separate human being would not be developing zygotes. Get your religious beliefs out of our lives.

You did not live during the time where women died regularly from backroom botched abortions, because of you religious wingnuts. Keep you religion and your “belief system” away from the rest of us.

You have no right – keep your religious beliefs within your own religous community. You may NOT, based on religious and personal beliefs. Judges who use the bench to uphold religious/beliefs not facts, should be removed from the bench!

Within the qualification of the conclusion that all these studies do not provide “convincing evidence” is the implicit admission that there is evidence of a connection between abortion and mental health problems.

First, there is the evidence of countless women who attribute mental health problems to their abortions and seek help from both licensed mental health providers and lay post-abortion peer support groups. Some of the evidence even include signed suicide notes, as in the widely covered case of Emma Beck, attributing their suicides to their abortions.

Second, there is the evidence of trained therapists confirming that abortion caused or exacerbated mental health problems. One of the authors of this review, Dr. Stotland, herself reports on being taken aback by a strong delayed post-abortion reaction in a patient. The latent reaction was triggered by a miscarriage which aroused unresolved issues. (See Abortion: Social Context, Psychodynamic Implications” Am J Psychiatry, 1998.)

Third, the reams of studies reviewed consistently show statistically signficant associations between numerous negative mental health outcomes and abortion. There is an especially large amoung of literature showing a positive association with abortion and increased subseqeunt substance abuse.

The approach of deniers is to insist that proponents of a connection have not “proven causality.” It is, of course, difficult to prove any causal connections in the field of mental health since the human mind is very complex, so this is always a safe area on which to plant one’s claim that the evidence is not sufficiently convincing to change one’s mind. The same “no causal proof” argument is raised by the deniers of global warming — and for many decades, by the tobacco industry.

Politically, this shift to a demand for causal proof is a two edged sword, however. The simple fact is that there is also not causal proof that abortion BENEFITS women. In fact, all the studies tend to show higher rates of negative affects statistically associated with abortion but few if any positive effects.

All the looked for benefits promised in the 70’s which would arise by sparing women the burden of caring unwanted pregnancies to term have failed to be measurable in any randomized statistical analysis of hard data. It appears that the best evidence for all the “benefits” of abortion still can be found only in anecdotes, presumptions, and ideology.

Every study has methodological weaknesses. Pointing to the weaknesses of studies linking abortion to mental health problems is fair, but it does not mean they should be dismissed out of hand. And it also comes with the expectation that those who support abortion must be able to bring forward superior studies which not only show less harm but actual benefits from abortion.