Friday, 28th January 2011

Is giving birth really more damaging to women's mental health than abortion? 

The New England Journal of Medicine is sometimes described as the world's leading medical journal (what someone usually means when they say this is that it is the one most closely in touch with fashionable progressive opinion). The most recent edition carries a study by a Danish research team which purports to prove that abortion is less problematic for women's future mental health than giving birth. 

Rather predictably, this has been seized upon by pro-abortionists as a conclusive demonstration that abortion does not pose any significant risk to women's mental health, and that abortion is therefore a better response to crisis pregnancy than helping a woman raise her child.  But is this actually true?

Not necessarily.  As LIFE commented to media outlets:

"This study is just one contribution to an ongoing debate. Many other studies have contradicted its findings and found links between abortion and subsequent mental health problems, e.g. the large-scale, long-term Fergusson study from New Zealand, which was undertaken by a team of pro-choice doctors and found that abortion was associated with an increased risk of mental health problems.  At LIFE we have counselled thousands of women following abortion and our experience demonstrates that many women do suffer badly after abortion, often many years later. 

This study has many, many limitations in its design, which call into question the reliability of its supposed conclusion that childbirth is more psychologically ‘risky' than abortion.  It only included women having a first abortion - when a third of abortions in the UK are repeat abortions - and it only included women who had abortions in the first trimester of pregnancy, so the women who may be more likely to experience mental health problems - i.e. those having their second or third abortion, or those having a later abortion - have had their experiences deliberately ignored.

Crucially, it only followed women for a year after their abortion, when we know from experience that many women's abortion-related traumas do not surface until long after their abortion.  The comparison with post-natal depression, which almost always surfaces within a year of birth if it is going to happen at all, is thus unfair and unhelpful. 

The authors define psychiatric problems too narrowly, and so don't get a true picture of women's experiences.  Just because a woman doesn't seek professional medical help doesn't mean she isn't experiencing mental health problems associated with her abortion.  Our forty years of counselling experience show that many women suffer in silence, because their feelings and their problems don't conform to a medical template and so are not taken seriously by doctors and clinics.”

Now it is important to be clear what pro-lifers are not claiming:

1.      We are not claiming that every woman who has an abortion will suffer serious psychological problems, or even that most women will.

2.      We are not claiming that women who do suffer problems after an abortion in some sense “deserve” it.

3.      We are not claiming that the wrongness of abortion depends on the possibility of subsequent mental health problems.

We do make more limited claims:

1.      That a significant minority of women who have abortions experience serious emotional and mental health consequences that are directly linked to their experience of abortion.  As the pro-abortion Michelle Goldberg wrote in The Guardian on 30th September 2008:

"Even if you don't think there's anything immoral about terminating an unwanted pregnancy, it is always painful for the woman involved, both physically and, in many cases, emotionally."

2.      That these consequences are not easily quantifiable by statistical and scientific research, since they often do not fit into medical categories, and are not recognised as problems by doctors.  Hence to say that "research proves that women don't suffer after abortion" is to miss the point. 

3.      That abortion providers and their ideological allies are not being honest with women, because of their ideological commitment to abortion, and are misrepresenting and distorting the state of the research into this issue, and trying to discredit the testimony of crisis pregnancy centres who work with women damaged by abortion.