Should, but won’t:
Women do not suffer mental health problems such as depression or post-traumatic stress disorder as a result of having an abortion, researchers reported Wednesday. The study, published by Danish scientists in the New England Journal of Medicine, adds to a growing body of scientific literature that has failed to find that abortion causes psychological problems, as some abortion opponents have asserted.
Abortion makes some people crazy, of course, just not people who’ve actually had abortions. Study here.
Of course it won’t settle the argument. The “data” presented by the prolifers are almost always across the board blatantly manufactured anyway. They just yell louder >.<
And of course having children never makes women crazy, causing them to, say, drown their kids one after another in the bathtub.
my abortion totally made me crazy.
Damn, that is gold right there.
Hey, break a leg tonight at your pilot taping or whatever, at a pizzeria I understand. MTV’s gonna pick up the pilot, the money’s gonna let you pay off your mortgage plus buy a boat like one of Keck’s, and soon you’ll look back wistfully at the days you could walk down the street mostly unmolested….
But abortion still makes baby Jeebus cry!
The best part of the study is that having kids makes women crazy, not having abortions. Post-partum depression is a serious thing, but I also think that in general kids make you crazy.
If you believe most FB profiles are true, you are also so gullible you believe wiki is true.
wikleaks == true – wiki mostly not.
@6 no, that’s just stress and hormones, really. Eventually things settle down and the husband ditches the wife for a younger more gullible woman.
gus, this probably means people will stop trying to budge him out of the first class line up, or if they do, he can get all “do you KNOW who I am?” on them… Yeah, seriously, break a leg. I’m going to have to resubscribe to those satellite bundles I just cancelled if (when!) MTV picks it up…
the only thing i suffered after my abortion was an overwhelming sense of relief and a period of rapid de-bloating. best decision i ever made, and thank goodness not only for planned parenthood but for the federal funding via medical coupon that covered my abortion care.
Chicago Fan, years ago, I kept a sign on the fridge that read, “If the kids are still alive at five, I’ve done my job.” It had the added benefit of encouraging Mr. Canuck to hurry home from work.
Some women (note I said “some”) are haunted having an abortion, which is not the same as mental illness or depression. So this study seems to be essentially orthogonal to the psychological and emotional affects (that “some” women have) in having an abortion.
A woman who suffers depression after an abortion, or while trying to make a decision, probably don’t suffer from depression because “abortions are bad”. If it exists, its probably caused by familial/societal/religious pressures not to have one.
Some women do lots of irreversible things that haunt them. I know, why don’t we lock ’em all up in convents until they’re good and desperate, and then marry ’em off to the highest bidder! You can’t regret anything if you’ve never been allowed to make your own decisions! Damn, I should win a prize.
Canuck, I certainly expect that when (not if) MTV picks up the pilot, it makes the series as widely available online for us non-cable-people as it has the Jersey Shore:
http://www.mtv.com/shows/jersey_shore/se…
The anti-choice crowd doesn’t concern themselves with rational, scietific studies. They don’t concern themselves with anything other than their fanatical foolishness.
My sister suffered from depression and guilt after her abortion, even though we were all supportive. The abortion didn’t cause it though, the fact that she’s overly sensitive and prone to drama did. She’s fine with it now 🙂
I don’t understand why possible depression is a good reason to not get an abortion in the first place. The majority of mothers experience post-partum depression. Sometimes it’s severe and life-long, other times it goes away on its own. Does that mean women should never ever have babies because it might make them depressed?
Depression is a natural part of life. Most people, for example, when having a chronically ill pet put down, would be depressed for a while afterwards. Does that mean we should let our chronically ill pets live in terrible pain until their natural deaths? Obviously not.
People get depressed. Often, something triggers the depression- pregnancy, abortion, a break-up, a death, losing a pet. Sometimes there’s no trigger, at least not that we can recognize. Depressed people should get help if it doesn’t go away on its own, but it’s still a natural part of life for most people.
Hell, miscarriages can be highly traumatizing for women. Since many pregancies end in miscarriages and miscarriages can be traumatizing, I guess we should just make sure that no woman ever gets pregnant again lest she become depressed. Would that make the pro-lifers happy?
Just to clarify, I’m not arguing that abortions cause depression- just that a lot of things can cause depression but sometimes we have to do them anyway and get through it. Even if it were true, “it might make you depressed for a while” is a shit reason to not get an abortion if you need/want one.
@Phoebe: That is probably the case. Good pre- and post-abortion counseling can mitigate that to an extent. Support from family and friends also helps. But hard decisions can haunt us for the rest of our lives regardless of what they are, even when we believe we’ve done the right thing. It’s hard to stop wondering what if. Nevertheless, this report and the many others that preceded it all conclude the same thing: access to abortion is healthy and safe for women.
I’ll throw my anecdotal experiences in here as well…
I know two women who have given up children for adoption (in both cases because they were young and naive and in denial too long and too far along to get abortions) and both of them were terribly, terribly depressed for years afterwards. One had an open adoption and the other had a closed one. Both are still pretty upset about their experiences. Both said they wished they had gotten abortions early so they wouldn’t have to go through what they did.
Um…. This was a study of Danish women.
Need I remind you of American Exceptionalism?
@21 You nailed it. Adoption is presented as this easy option, but it is often extremely traumatic for the mother. If you haven’t read THE GIRLS WHO WENT AWAY by Ann Fessler, it’s extremely good–one of the women compares closed adoption to sending a child out into the woods and having no idea what happened to him/her.
@22 Is one of the funniest unregistered posts I’ve seen in a while. Recommend highly. Would buy again.
My wife and I support abortion rights.
That said, we (she of course) aborted what would have been our second child. At our 20 week ultrasound we discovered that he had a single chamber heart, lacking the powerful left side. He would have required open heart surgery at birth and at least two other open heart surgeries before his second birthday, if not more. These surgeries would allow him to possibly survive his infancy, and he would have needed a heart transplant by the time he was five, and he then would have needed another heart transplant in his adolescence. I was too upset to remember whether even more transplants would have been required at later years. His maximum life span was projected at around 30 years, assuming all the surgeries went well, which was by no means guaranteed. The medical experts were unified in their recommendation of abortion as long as we were comfortable with the choice. That’s what we did.
Despite the fact that we agreed that we would abort that baby, and we continue to think that we did the right thing, it remains one of the saddest things that has ever happened to us. It is one of the most psychologically important events of my life.
The fact that this was a wanted baby rather than the result of a failure of birth control is doubtless important. Also the fact that it happened at such a late stage is important. Still, while to us it did not rise all the way to level of “our child has died” (avoiding that experience is in fact why we chose to abort) but it did rise high enough to at least be measured on that scale.
It has been just over five years since that abortion. Only the birth of our second child has allowed me to get over it at all. He helped us heal from that experience. Now it is more of an abstract pain than the vibrant grief it was for years.
I know that it is handy to try to fight absolutist rhetoric from the right with absolutist rhetoric from the left. However, the necessity for some abortions does not magically render them free from emotional consequences. The fact that a trade off is worth making does not mean that there was nothing lost. The fact that something is a net good does not mean there were no negatives in the first place, it just means that the positives outweigh the negatives.
@Learned Hand
Thank you!
As someone who has both given up a child for adoption (and is still haunted by it 19 years later despite knowing that she is doing ok through the updates I receive from the agency) and had an abortion (and barely lost a wink of sleep over it other than some initial residual evangelical guilt) I would like to ditto both Olive and Urgutha Forka. Abortion does not damn women to misery and adoption does not leave everyone singing folk songs happily a la’ Juno. I’ve also given birth to very wanted babies and suffered from pretty severe PPD. Someone joked about the only solution being to keep women from getting pregnant at all to make sure they don’t risk getting depressed. Leaving aside the joke, having been there and done that both ways I would say that needs to be the take away. Keep women from getting pregnant through education and cheap and accessible birth control and we can stop worrying about whether or not they’re depressed by whatever difficult choice they make to resolve their unplanned pregnancy!
I think @22 wins for best comment though. Love it!