Posted on 02/23/2006 4:56:47 AM PST by Milltownmalbay
New studies show that women suffer serious side-effects after aborting a child, says Zenit.org. Many of these side-effects are psychological, and effect woman long after the abortion has taken place.
The Sydney Morning Herald reported the “most detailed long-term study to date into the divisive question.” The New Zealand study was done by David Fergusson, who describes himself as “an atheist, a rationalist and pro-choice”. The study tracked 1,265 girls born in the 1970s. 41% of these woman became pregnant by the age of 25, and 14.6% (90 women) sought an abortion. By the age of 25, 42% of those who procured an abortion also experienced a major depression. This number was 35% higher than those who had chosen to continue a pregnancy. The risk of anxiety disorders rose in a similar fashion. A woman who had procured an abortion was twice as likely to drink alcohol at dangerous levels compared to one who continued the pregnancy.
The Washington Times reported a study done by Priscilla Coleman that claimed that woman who aborted has a 144% greater risk of physically abusing their children compared to those who did not terminate their pregnancy. Coleman said that a “good number of women who have abortions” experience bereavement and guilt, which turn to anger.
Coleman also noticed that though women who have miscarriages also experience negative psychological effects, these effects last longer in women who have aborted. A study carried out at the University of Oslo supports this statement. The study looked at 40 women who suffered miscarriages and 80 women who terminated a pregnancy. Researchers questioned the woman at 10 days, six months, two years, and five years after the end of the pregnancy. Woman who had miscarriages suffered more negative effects at the 6 month period. However, those who had an abortion experience more mental distress at the two and five year period.
Abortion also effects having another baby. A French study of 2,837 births found woman who once had an abortion were 1.7 times more likely to give birth to a baby at less than 28 weeks gestation. Babies born at this point die soon after birth, or suffer serious disability if they survive.
The South Dakota Department of Health has accumulated statistics from the year 2003 regarding abortions in the state. In 814 out of the 819 procedures, the only information given to the pregnant mothers about the unborn children was the gestational age of the children. In 813 of the procedures, this information was provided by a recorded statement. Mothers never had a chance to question the doctor. According to witnesses from a Planned Parenthood clinic, the first time the women met their physician was in the procedure room. At that point, the woman has signed a consent form and committed to the procedure.
Selena Ewing, a researcher at the Southern Cross Bioethics Institute, Adelaide, has found that most abortions result from lack of support of pregnant women, from both men and the community. Abortions are also linked with domestic violence.
Agreed. :)
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bttt
It was a talk by a pro-life OBGYN that made my mind up on abortion forever. She confirmed this study -- she says she repeatedly counsels women who cry over a past abortion even up to 20 years later. She emphasized the health issues of abortion since abortion clinics close at 5 and patients have to go to the emergency room if they have complications. The complications never get linked back to the originating clinic. Plus there are plenty of other complications that are long term and would never get linked back to the procedure. Its time we stopped having special rules for abortion providers and held them accountable just like the rest of medicine.
So, you don't consider such an embryo to be a human being?
The fact that external assistance is necessary to allow the egg to develop into an embryo shouldn't matter. After all, a zygote needs a human womb and the nutrients of a woman to develop. The fact is, we now know that a fertilized zygote and a female egg both independently contain all the genetic information necessary for further development into the embryonic stage. If embryos are people, why shouldn't they both be considered human beings?
And researchers are working to correct the defects that prevent the parthenogenic embryos from reaching full development. I doubt that any pro-lifer will deny that a born baby created from nothing more than a female egg is a human being. Considering this, shouldn't the female egg be given the benefit of the doubt and be treated as a person?
And this is not the abuse of metaphysics, this is simply an example of how fuzzy the question of personhood is. Future examples will have to do with artificial intelligence, which will produce androids who are thousands of times smarter than you or I and who will be able to make extremely compelling arguments as to why they should be treated as persons.
My brother took the Hippocratic Oath at MCV. I'd have to count on my fingers to be sure exactly when, but I think it was about 11 years ago. His wife, in Pittsburgh, was sworn with a different oath a few years later (her class voted). She had voted for the Hippocratic Oath, so he swore her in with it privately.
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No offense, but can you read? What do you think "42%" means? What do you think "major depression" means? Can you think of any other surgical procedure where almost half the patients suffer from a major depression?
Forty percent of my household is only two people, but if that 40% is a depression rate or a mortality rate, 2 is a lot.
There are purportedly 1 million - 1.5 million abortions a year in the US. What % of those are rapes? If the vast majority (recall that the plaintiff in Roe admits now she lied about being raped, hmm...) are NOT rapes, don't make the policy for all based on an exception.
And oh, by the way, why are you using a different argument here than about the Russian women who had 9-10 abortions each during the 1970's ? Were they all getting raped, too?
The obvious answer is to eliminate rape, not to use it as a cheap political football.
Cheers!
10% with a such a serious morbidity as infertility is considered a high risk for surgical procedures. Especially for "elective" procedures.
We normally consider 1-2% within range, but hope for less. And surgeons are glad when the 30 day period (for counting complications against the surgeon's record) is over.
http://www.euroanesthesia.org/education/rc_vienna/02rc1.HTM
I can remember girls discussing future babies when I was a teen. And, when I teach our local kids about STD's, I get questions from 6th graders about relatives who had "PID" and now are infertile. (I answer these questions diplomatically, and refuse to actually answer about the specific case. But, when I've just shown the connection between infection, scarring, and infertility...)
If abortion were private, there wouldn't be multiple layers of State and Federal regulations on the procedures, materials and facilities. And their would be no need for "commerce" laws to protect abortionists.
Oh, and there's the 3rd individual - the one who comes into the room alive and leaves dead.
I hope you look into Libertarians for Life, Feminists for Life.
Lots of people are working to attenuate those "untenable" situaitions - you might consider volunteering with a local abstinance foundation and/or a local crisis pregnancy center. Or, perhaps, volunteer to baby sit for one of the girls.
The info about the Russian women was brought up to refute the often-repeated myth that abortion causes infertility.
"causes" or "is liable to cause" ??
e.g. possibly depends on state of pregnancy, method of abortion, expertise of practitioner, etc. etc.
Just raising possible issues for those who have actively studied the physiology of "foetus, interrupted".
Obviously all medical procedures have compication rates which are affected by things like the level of expertise of the person performing them, the specific methods used and equipment available, and other pre-existing medical conditions of the patient. Abortion is no different. But having lived in Russia around the time in question (and in Moscow, where medical care was no doubt better than in most of the Soviet Union), I know that the level of medical care there in the 1970s was primitive even by US standards at that time, and even more so in comparison to current US standards. Women who were there as dependents of Western diplomats, or working for Western embassies or businesses there NEVER had babies or even a D&C in a Moscow hospital because the standards were so appalling. Everyone went to Helsinki. And yet despite the low standards, most Russian women had many, many abortions, which would have been impossible if the rate of infertility caused by an abortion was significant.
It's relatively easy to get blocked tubes as a result of routine infections (sometimes that a woman was never aware that she had) and endometriosis, and from gynecological surgery for fibroids, endometriosis, D&C, and other non-abortion procedures. These are behind nearly all cases of tubal infertility. So I expect that a lot of the claimed examples of infertility caused by abortion are actually just examples of infertility which arose at some time following an abortion. It would be awfully hard to distinguish the two, since very few women who choose to have an abortion start trying to get pregnant again soon afterwards. And each advancing year of age provides more opportunity to have one of the other common causes arise. No doubt there are SOME cases where abortion causes tubal infertility (in other words, causes a type of infertility which is easily overcome with IVF, and does not in any way constitute "sterility"). But probably no higher than the rate of tubal infertility caused by complications of pregnancy or childbirth.
The "don't have an abortion because it can make you sterile" line is just a scare story told by people who oppose abortion under any circumstances, and don't mind lying to persuade women not to have them. Naturally, having an abortion or any other surgical procedure done in some back alley clinic by someone who may or may not have any medical training, and certainly doesn't have the proper equipment on hand, is likely to lead to all sorts of complications, with infertility being the least of the things to be feared. With abortion legal in the US, there's little of that going on, and the dangers of back alley surgical procedures are illustrated mainly by the steady flow of deaths and severe disfigurements from plastic surgery performed by unlicensed quacks.
In case you hadn't noticed, there are "multiple layers of State and Federal regulations" on ALL medical procedures, materials and facilities. I wish conservatives would focus on fixing that problem, instead of obsessing over abortion.
Actually, this isn't true yet. They can get the egg to multiply a few times, and LOOK like an early embryo, but they are not viable. You can't implant one in a uterus and get a baby. However, that will likely change before too long. Parthenogenetic reproduction has been accomplished in amphibians, but I don't think it's been done in any mammals yet, certainly not humans. Chief problem is that the mature human egg is haploid. To get one to grow into a viable embryo, you'd either have to combine the genetic material of two eggs into one egg"shell", or somehow get the egg to "mature" enough to fertilize without undergoing its second meiotic division.
However, recent research has shown that sperm also contributes some non-genetic material which is probably essential to getting to an egg to turn into an embryo. So most likely, those substances would have to be added to a diploid egg by some means, either by inserting a sperm cell that had had its nucleus removed, or by isolating or synthesizing the substances. And the egg provides a lot of necessary material too, beside its genes, so producing an embryo from sperm would probably involve something along the lines of inserting two sperm (an X and a Y) into an enucleated egg. These things will all happen in our lifetime.
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