Abortion harms women. The Royal College of Psychiatrists is taking a very strong stand on this, saying it’s time to reverse positions and overturn policies on abortions. According to today’s [London] Times Online,
Women may be at risk of mental health breakdowns if they have abortions, a medical royal college has warned. The Royal College of Psychiatrists says women should not be allowed to have an abortion until they are counselled on the possible risk to their mental health. This overturns the consensus that has stood for decades that the risk to mental health of continuing with an unwanted pregnancy outweighs the risks of living with the possible regrets of having an abortion.
(Emphasis added.)
When I first looked at this article on the Times website, the first comment there read almost like a punch line:
“No one should ever counsel a woman….she should trust her feelings.”
Charles, Vancouver, Washington
(This comment has now moved off the front page. Click “read all comments” to find it. The ellipsis was in the original.)
We’ll come back to Charles in a moment.
Douglas Groothuis has predicted this report will not see the light of day in U.S. media, except on pro-life websites. That would be consistent with the American Psychological Association’s (APA’s) response to earlier studies with similar findings. More than two years ago researchers in New Zealand, using gold-standard study methods, found that women who had undergone abortions suffer significantly increased levels of mental health troubles, including depression, anxiety, suicidal thoughts, and substance abuse. These results were contrary to the researchers’ expectations.
A few months later 15 experts put their signatures under this statement in the Times of London:
“Research published in The Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry in January has shown that even women without past mental health problems are at risk of psychological ill-effects after abortion. 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.”
Research into these issues is ongoing, and there have been studies in which no negative mental health effects on women were revealed. The very real likelihood of such effects, however, has either been understated or ignored. Now the Royal College is quite responsibly recognizing that large-scale, high-quality studies are indicating that abortion can be harmful to women’s mental health.
The APA’s response to this has been to edit their “Briefing Sheet on the Impact of Abortion on Women.” On October 31, 2006, it very helpfully read,
“This fact sheet is currently being updated. For other information, please visit our homepage at www.apa.org/ppo.”
How informative. I wondered at the time if and when they would be have the courage to tell the whole story. Today, over one year and four months later, it reads,
“This fact sheet is currently being updated. For other information, please visit our homepage at www.apa.org/ppo.”
… which sounds vaguely similar to the last time. (I wonder if my Psych professors would have granted me my degree if I’d taken that long to “update” my thesis.) The APA certainly isn’t leading the charge in promoting mental health (never mind the “health effects” on the unborn child who gets killed). The Washington Times reported in 2006:
Dr. Russo pointed out that in 1969 the APA adopted the position that abortion should be a civil right. She added, “To pro-choice advocates, mental health effects are not relevant to the legal context of arguments to restrict access to abortion.”
According to Dr. Russo, pro-choice researchers have a different agenda. “To someone who believes that the decision to have a child is a personal decision, protected by a right of privacy, evidence about negative effects of abortion is important, but for a different policy goal — to provide women accurate information so they can make informed choices in their pregnancy decisionmaking process.”
The APA is a mental health organization except when it’s a civil rights organization. Try this thought experiment to see how consistent that position is. Remove the word “abortion” from that quote, and enter “using heroin” in its place. Both have advocates for and against their legalization, on civil rights grounds; both have documented mental health effects….
Which brings us back to the “punch line” we opened with here. Charles thinks it’s wrong to counsel a woman regarding abortion. “She should trust her own feelings,” he said. Do you suppose any boyfriend, husband, or one-night-stand-jerk has ever “counseled” a woman that if she didn’t get an abortion he was going to drop her right then and there–or worse? That’s the kind of “counseling” a woman doesn’t need, but I’ll wager women get more information about their future health risks from that kind of discussion than they get from Planned Parenthood.
What if a trained and qualified psychologist told a woman an abortion would likely double her risk of mental health problems, and even triple her risk of depression? Charles thinks that would be bad. “She should trust her feelings” instead. He probably views abortion as a very personal issue and a civil right. He also appears to represent an abortion-protection position that’s extreme to the point of silliness. Let’s let him go, then; we need not consider him representative of the pro-abortion position. What about the APA, though? What about the media in America? What do you suppose they’re thinking about this? Don’t ever say anything bad about abortion! You’ll give the anti-choice wackos more ammunition!
In fact, by their silence the APA and the U.S. media have been saying, for at least 16 months, Protect abortion at all costs. They’re saying that protecting abortion is far, far more important than protecting babies. That’s okay, they say; babies aren’t really persons. Now, I think that’s a really lousy argument, but I’ll grant that it’s at least an argument. By their continuing silence, though, they are also saying that protecting abortion is far more important than protecting women.
The parallel is striking. Does it mean they believe women aren’t really persons? If not, why the silence?
One further important point: changing abortion policy is not the only value at issue here. Some readers of this article have probably had abortions, others have probably encouraged someone to have an abortion, and many others have been otherwise been close to issue in a very personal way. I don’t want the policy side of the issue to blind us to the actual effects many have experienced. The research cited by the Royal College of Psychiatrists is very statistical and abstract, but it represents real women. I deplore the APA’s public disregard of these very real persons. I do not want to be guilty of the same. An article like this calls for a follow-up addressing their real-life situations.
Guilt is one likely issue, addressed very sensitively here. I’m not sure I’m qualified to go far beyond that. Every woman’s (and every family’s) experience is too different. I don’t know how to speak to it. I would welcome others’ suggestions for good articles and resources to help.
More information at Magic Statistics.
[Original links to some of the 2006 news stories have been closed by the respective newspapers. I'll vouch for the quotes, though, which were live in the news sources when I first blogged on them, as linked here. They can also be confirmed by Google searches.]
Because of this, it seems the proper thing to do is ensure that counseling is done by woman who haven’t had abortions.
Well, I wouldn’t say that, Steve. The best counselors are generally people who have faced their own soul issues and are working through them….
I was partly joking. The serious part of my comment was meant to say that you have to avoid certain counselors.
*cough* *cough* Planned Parenthood
I would speculate that it is actually fundamentalist Christian “pro-lifers” who cause mental health problems in women who have abortions, by accusing them of murder, picketing abortion clinics, holding signs with pictures of mangled fetuses, making (and sometimes fulfilling) threats, and just generally promoting a society-wide antagonism towards abortion.
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?
Such speculation from pro-abortion advocates was predictable, Jordan. Researchers are not so naive, though. They control for such things statistically. Don’t you think it’s rather unlikely the Royal College would overlook the possibilities you raised, and even less likely they would whitewash them?
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.
I would be interested to know how they managed to do that…
Commonly they include items relating to such influences in their survey instruments, and use multiple regression, partial correlation, analysis of covariance, or related non-parametric methods to factor out those influences.
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.
Man, I need to learn more about statistics…
Another reason why Jordan’s hypothesis doesn’t hold water is that very few British Christians support picketing and other public harassment of abortion clinics, doctors, or clients. In 2005, one small radical Christian group announced such a campaign, but abortion clinic operators across the UK say they never even noticed it.
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.
Jordan presented a similar hypothesis about a year and a half ago.
http://www.haloscan.com/comments/tgilblog/E20061031103307/#188588
It didn’t fare so well then, either.
Charlie,
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.
Hi Jordan,
Thanks. I actually forgot that it was you, but knew somebody had advanced the argument. Imagine my surprise.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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?
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.
Where does this cavalier attitude towards pregnancy come from?
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.
Since some 50+% of blastocysts (early stage development) are naturally aborted, what are the determining factors which create depression in women undergoing medical abortion?
Is it due to a later stage of abortion?
Due to the invasiveness of the procedure?
A negative view of the procedure (as Jordon pointed out)?
Guilt about having made the choice themselves, instead of it occurring without their knowledge?
Do the studies cited illuminated these details?