Do the studies cited illuminated these details?

Don’t people realize there are complex changes in the brain of a pregnant woman?

How ignorant must you be, to think interrupting pregnancy won’t have unintended consequences?

Perhaps a few people actually believe the propaganda about pregnancy as just the growth of a clump of cells.

1) Good memory! I had totally forgotten about that thread.

Thanks. I actually forgot that it was you, but knew somebody had advanced the argument. Imagine my surprise.

2) I don’t think my hypothesis fared poorly in that thread, and it hasn’t exactly been refuted in this one either (unless you have very loose standards of refutation).

We still disagree, on whether your argument fared well and on the necessary tension in my standards. You abandoned your every point and changed the wording to make them tenable. That seemed to me like they were not faring well.

It all boils down to how they are quantifying the level of perceived hostility towards women who have abortions. It doesn’t take a significant percentage of the population to picket at abortion clinics or to say disgusting things about pro-choicers–i.e., to at least create the illusion of widespread hostility.

As I said then, I have no evidence of what this perceived hostility is. But I know that the doctors, nurses, professional care-givers and advisors all tell the women that what they are doing is perfectly fine. As does virtually the entirety of our popular culture. I know women who had termination recommended to them as the normal course when their babies were diagnosed (falsely, in one case) with potential birth-defects. Women are often treated with “hostility” when they won’t abort in these cases - some are denied care by their physicians and must find other doctors.

3) In the thread you linked to, you cited a poll about New Zealander’s attitudes towards the legality of abortion, which is largely irrelevant to this (and our prior) discussion.

Which was an excellent counter to your claim that most of society was hostile (and sometimes violently) to abortion. Almost half of the population approved of abortions for no reason other than that the mother wanted one. Since law is often and mostly a reflection of moral tendency the studies are at least correlative to some degree.
Further studies show us that there is little to no pro-life movement in New Zealand and that one organization that was moved there failed due to sufficient “conservative” support in that nation. More evidence against your claim - which was backed by nothing but speculation.
My links also showed that 1 in 5 pregnancies is terminated by abortion. Planned Parenthood tells us abortions are safe and common, why, 1/3 women will have abortions. Women are not receiving the message that abortion is wrong - quite the opposite.

That is a disturbingly sizable percentage. I wonder what percentage of the American population belonged to the KKK at the height of its power… Less than 5%, I would imagine, yet no-one can deny the negative impact of that organization on the psychological well-being of blacks.

What was that you just said about relevance? Do you have any evidence that any of these women feared a lynching? Or that they had crosses burned on their lawns? Or that their psychological symptoms were the result of threats and harassment?
What the studies show, as admitted by a pro-choice advocate (and buried by his superiors) was that the abortion itself was the likely cause of the negative psychological outcomes.
Why would the opinions of ignorant, fundamentalist rubes affect their well-being when the trained and informed professionals affirm their decisions and assure them there is nothing wrong?

At any rate, if it’s not the fundamentalist pro-lifers who are causing these women to develop mental health problems, then what is it? I think that’s the important question here.

What indeed. Can you imagine anything that might cause a mother who terminates her pregnancy distress? Anything inherent in the action itself? Anything at all?

And another question: What normative conclusions can we draw from any of this? Even if abortion, per se, causes women to develop mental health problems, that doesn’t make it wrong, and it doesn’t imply that women should never have abortions.

It implies what Tom suggested in the previous thread and what he suggested here: that this information should not be buried. That if women are to be free to make a choice that they need to have the appropriate information (otherwise it’s not really a choice at all). They ought to be warned of the potential psychological effects. I don’t buy a bottle of medication without getting a print-out of the potential side-effects and a verbal warning about all that can go wrong.

1) Good memory! I had totally forgotten about that thread.

2) I don’t think my hypothesis fared poorly in that thread, and it hasn’t exactly been refuted in this one either (unless you have very loose standards of refutation). It all boils down to how they are quantifying the level of perceived hostility towards women who have abortions. It doesn’t take a significant percentage of the population to picket at abortion clinics or to say disgusting things about pro-choicers–i.e., to at least create the illusion of widespread hostility.

3) In the thread you linked to, you cited a poll about New Zealander’s attitudes towards the legality of abortion, which is largely irrelevant to this (and our prior) discussion. And even if the poll had been about the morality of abortion, note that 5% of New Zealanders think no woman should ever be allowed to have an abortion, even if her life is in danger! That is a disturbingly sizable percentage. I wonder what percentage of the American population belonged to the KKK at the height of its power… Less than 5%, I would imagine, yet no-one can deny the negative impact of that organization on the psychological well-being of blacks.

—

At any rate, if it’s not the fundamentalist pro-lifers who are causing these women to develop mental health problems, then what is it? I think that’s the important question here.

And another question: What normative conclusions can we draw from any of this? Even if abortion, per se, causes women to develop mental health problems, that doesn’t make it wrong, and it doesn’t imply that women should never have abortions.

The Royal College of Psychiatrists is the professional body of psychiatrists in the UK and has been in existence since 1841. It is not a Christian organisation. As Tom suggested, their statistical specialists are well versed in techniques necessary to take confounding influences into account and isolate the effect of the variable(s) of interest.

The college’s statement says that their change of view is based on a literature review, that is, they critically evaluated dozens of recent scientifically reliable studies from many parts of the world and found that many of those studies present credible evidence of a causal link between having an abortion and subsequent mental distress.

In English: they statistically factor them out, using universally accepted research techniques.

Here’s one fairly understandable way that’s done: divide the research sample into groups depending on how much they have been exposed to/influenced by these kinds of influences, and compare their outcomes. That’s one way to determine the actual effect of those influences.

Considerably more sophisticated techniques are also used.

They control for such things statistically.

I would be interested to know how they managed to do that…

Your supposed Christian influence on mental health outcomes is especially unlikely in the U.K. and New Zealand, where Christians are a much smaller minority. Note especially that the New Zealand researcher set out to show the opposite of what he found (follow the links for more).

Your speculation is devoid of evidence.

This seems to be a recurring theme:

1) Christians harass A for doing X
2) This harassment has negative effect, Y, on A
3) Christians claim X causes Y (citing correlation), and is therefore “sinful”
4) Goto 1

And then there’s a similar variation (used in your “Positive outcomes of Christianity” posts):

1) Christians praise/reward A for being Christians
2) This praise/reward has positive effect, Y, on A
3) Christians claim that Christianity causes Y (citing correlation), and is therefore good/true
4) Goto 1

It’s a convenient little routine, isn’t it?

*cough* *cough* Planned Parenthood

“Women who had had abortions had twice the level of mental health problems and three times the risk of major depressive illness as those who had given birth or never been pregnant.”

Because of this, it seems the proper thing to do is ensure that counseling is done by woman who haven’t had abortions.