ABORTION AND MENTAL HEALTH

ABORTION AND MENTAL HEALTH عربي - Francais

Here’s a new study, folks, published in the American Journal of Orthopsychiatry, July issue. It shows that induced abortion is harmful to a woman’s mental health. The authors examined Medi-Cal (that’s welfare cases in California) records for 173,000 women. They took the rate of psychiatric outpatient treatment for women who had had abortions and compared them to women who had delivered babies.

To neutralize any prior existing psychological problems, they excluded women who had had any psychiatric care for a full year prior to the pregnancy outcome.

The results were quite clear. Women who had had abortions were 63% more likely to receive professional mental health care within three months of an abortion as compared to women three months after a delivery. In longer follow-up for over four years, significantly higher rates of continuing mental health treatment persisted. Abortion was most strongly related to neurotic depression, bi-polar disorder, adjustment reactions, even schizophrenic reactions.

This brought back memories of when I was president of National Right to Life in Reagan’s final year in office in 1988. At our request, he asked Surgeon General Koop to do such a study. Koop concluded, and I agreed, that with almost no exception, all the studies done up to that point were so methodologically flawed that no firm conclusions could be drawn, particularly about abortion’s mental health risks.

He recommended that a major, federally funded, longitudinal, prospective, double blind study of the health risks be done. He sent me to the Center for Disease Control in Atlanta, Georgia. I spent a full day with the lead people down there. As it turned out, they were all dyed-in-the-wool supporters of abortion and spent the entire day trying to convince me that delivery of a baby was more dangerous than induced abortion.

It was one of the most frustrating and sad days of my professional life to know that this government-funded agency was literally a satellite of Planned Parenthood and that the staff there had absolutely no intention of doing any objective investigation of potential harm from abortion.

I returned to Washington with this pessimistic report, but President Reagan’s days were running out. The end of his term was near, and the amount of money needed to do such a study was substantial. Congress was controlled by Democrats, most of them were quite pro-abortion, and the result was that the whole proposal died.

We have had several small studies since, and this adds to that and looks pretty good. What we do need, however, is the kind of proposal that we suggested to Dr. Koop back then. But I don’t think we’re going to get it passed the strongly pro-abortion president of this Senate, Senator Tom Daschle.
http://www.lifeissues.org/radio/r2002/12/r36-23.htm

Saint Charbel for Life
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