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.]
