Women, Abortion, and Mental Health: Ah, Who Cares?

The American Psychological Association (APA) recently released a report that said there was no reliable evidence that a single abortion affected a woman’s mental health.

I am actually stunned that the American Psychological Association would even make the following statement: "There is no credible evidence that a single elective abortion of an unwanted pregnancy in and of itself causes mental health problems for adult women, according to a draft report released Tuesday by a task force of the American Psychological Association."

Have they ever talked to a woman who has had an abortion? By reading this report I personally would say NO. What is even driving this kind of nonsense reporting? How much money and resources were spent on this WASTE of a report? I have an idea: I would like the panel that did this report to contact Stacy Massey, President of Abortion Recovery InterNational, Inc. (I haven’t even spoke with her or asked, but I am sure she would love some volunteer help) and volunteer to take calls for one day and THEN tell me that their is no credible evidence that a single elective abortion of an unwanted pregnancy in and of itself causes mental health problems for adult women. (I call BULL!)

The report is really just a literature review. Well, it isn’t really a literature review. A lot of the psychological literature was dismissed as methodologically unsound. So, the report is really based on only a limited number of studies.

If the authors of the APA report decided that a study didn’t first pass a methodological test, it was automatically dismissed as unreliable and thrown out of the sample of studies they looked at. In “science,” you see, there’s nothing to learn from experience, instinct, or insight.

The APA report is somewhat reminiscent of what happened when an Australian doctor discovered that a bacterium (called Helicobacter pylori) caused stomach ulcers. For decades, accepted medical wisdom was that peptic ulcers were caused by stress and lifestyle. Whole chunks of peoples’ stomachs were surgically removed – sometimes repeatedly – in an attempt to cure them of ulcers. Sometimes that worked. All too often, it didn’t.

Doctors Marshall and Warren of Australia discovered the true cause of peptic ulcers and won a Nobel Prize for it in 2005. Their discovery is generally considered one of the ten most significant developments in medical history. Given the suffering and the radical, invasive treatments of the time, you would think doctors jumped at the chance to embrace a new explanation for stomach ulcers. They didn’t. Dr. Marshall was even ridiculed for his claims. Besides, many doctors said, he had not performed proper experiments. Until he did that (which involved great expense that research organizations were hesitant to underwrite given the skepticism), his findings were simply to be ignored. So the suffering needlessly continued for years.

Now let’s put this APA report in the proper context. Five of the six authors were women. Although we’re dealing with women’s mental health and it is certainly proper for women to be on a task force looking at the mental health implications of abortion, is this really the most objective group? You can find all five of them easily on the web and they certainly appear to be a fine group of professionals, but so were the ridiculers of Drs. Marshall and Warren.

One of the reasons those who are anti-abortion have a hard time with “health of the mother exceptions” to proposed laws against such heinous procedures as partial birth abortions is that “mental health” would constitute such an exception. Mental health is a notoriously amorphous notion. Much depends on the beliefs of the person performing a diagnosis, so it’s likely that a mother wanting an abortion will always be able to find a doctor who will sincerely testify that the mother’s (mental) health is in danger.

It might be helpful if each of the task force members who authored the APA report would come clean on whether they think a mother’s mental health would be negatively affected by carrying an unwanted baby to full term. Why? Well, if they think carrying an unwanted baby to term is mentally unhealthy, there would naturally be a tendency to think of abortion as not so unhealthy. Abortion, in fact, might even be therapeutic in their minds.

Actually, they do sort of come clean. Here’s a quote from the study’s conclusion. “[A]mong women who have a single, legal, first-trimester abortion of an unplanned pregnancy for nontherapeutic reasons, the relative risks of mental health problems are no greater than the risks among women who deliver an unplanned pregnancy.” Since women have abortions for nontherapeutic reasons, the authors must think many have them for therapeutic reasons. So the question is relevant. Would the task force’s members sign off on an affidavit to make an exception to a partial birth abortion ban for the sake of a mother’s mental health? If they would, a first trimester abortion would seem trivial to them.

That’s the other important piece of that quote. It is only talking about first trimester abortions. Given the parameters of the studies that are acceptable to the authors of the report, it is highly unlikely that any of the acceptable studies looks at women over a long period of time. So the studies are concerned with women whose only real physical manifestation of their pregnancy has been a few missed periods. And, they’ve not had years to consider their action. If they’ve borne other children, they might even initially feel relief for the lessened responsibility.

What of the day when mothers of first-trimester babies see pictures that look like these? What if these mothers find out that their first-trimester child had fingers and toes, and a discernible nose? What of these mothers’ mental health then? It just doesn’t look like the APA particularly cares.