New Zealand Study on Effects of Abortion on Women
An interesting study on the effects of abortion on women was published last January. Did anyone hear about it? I had noticed it, but I don't recall there being a whole lot of hullabaloo in the media over the research (more the sound of sweeping, as with a broom under a carpet) so I wanted to mention it here just in case you had missed it.
Three pro-abortion researchers in New Zealand, David Fergusson, L. John Horwood, and Elizabeth M. Ridder, followed a group of women who were between the ages of 15-25 years at the beginning of the study for the subsequent 25 years. The goal was to determine if there were any mental health complications for women who chose to abort. The expectation was that there would be none.
Forty-one percent of the women in the study became pregnant before they turned 25. Of those, 14.6% chose to end their pregnancies with an abortion. Even after taking into consideration other factors, there were statistically significant increases in mental health disorders for women who aborted, including suicidal behaviors, depression, anxiety, and substance abuse issues.
The study, "Abortion in Young Women and Subsequent Mental Health", was published in the Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, January 2006, Volume 47, pp. 16-24. While the entire report must be purchased, the abstract can still be viewed.
posted by Anna Venger @ 12:02 PM
3 comments
3 Comments:
This is not rocket science!!
killing of one's own blood is not good for mental health even if this act is done with some clear conscience, the residual damage is ferocious...it is only common sense.
I am not for the total ban of this procedure but it must be checked.
I suspect that the contorted argument that would tend to come to the Leftist mind would be of this structure: "If the fundamentalists were not out there stigmatizing abortion then those women would feel fine about it!"
Note that this argument is devoid of empirical facts, in fact that empirical facts go against it because women in various cultures have always engaged in "self-soothing" of the Self, from creating little idols representing killed babies and putting them in shrines to the "mental health" issues like alcoholism seen empirically in modern times as you note here.
In all these things the evidence seems to point to a link between consciousness and Conscience, e.g. one case of its perversion as the original Natural Law becomes twisted around: "...there was the woman of chapter two, who had her first abortion out of anger because her husband had been unfaithful to her, and her second because “I wanted to be able to hate myself more for what I did to the first baby.” In much the same way that some people use one credit card to pay off another, she was trying to abate her present remorse by increasing her burden of future remorse."(The Revenge of Conscience: Politics
and the Fall of Man
by J. Budziszewski)
He argues that you can unwind the moral reasoning involved to see the Law that was "written on the heart" all along. I.e., you cannot have a perversion of things without the true version being there first. It's unfortunate that the women in such studies are learning the knowledge of good and evil the hard way.
Yes, Nancy, but so many people insist that it is only a blob of tissue, that a woman's right trumps those of the blob, that it's no different than having a wart removed. Many, many years ago, (did I emphasize it was many?), I had considered joining NOW. But I could not get past the abortion on demand stance, and currently, all the other goofy, angry things they do...
Mynym,
Thanks for visiting my place for a change. I was afraid I was taking advantage of your hospitality!
I do think we know instinctively there's more to this issue than some would have us believe. And I think the women's movt knows there is tremendous suffering out there in the aftermath.
I took Revenge of Conscience out of the library, but I never got a chance to read it (this blogging stuff is cutting into my reading time!) Is it worth my while to request it later?
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