Posted on 12/04/2008 10:39:39 AM PST by presidio9
No high-quality study done to date can document that having an abortion causes psychological distress, or a "post-abortion syndrome," and efforts to show it does occur appear to be politically motivated, U.S. researchers said on Thursday.
A team at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore reviewed 21 studies involving more than 150,000 women and found the high-quality studies showed no significant differences in long-term mental health between women who choose to abort a pregnancy and others.
"The best research does not support the existence of a 'post-abortion syndrome' similar to post-traumatic stress disorder," Dr. Robert Blum, who led the study published in the journal Contraception, said in a statement.
"Based on the best available evidence, emotional harm should not be a factor in abortion policy. If the goal is to help women, program and policy decisions should not distort science to advance political agendas," added Vignetta Charles, a researcher and doctoral student at Johns Hopkins who worked on the study.
An estimated 1.29 million American women get elective abortions each year, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. An estimated 25 million women globally have legal abortions every year.
Abortion is a hot-button political issue, with many voters and members of the U.S. Congress as well as state lawmakers seeking to ban it.
"The U.S. Supreme Court, while noting that 'we find no reliable data to measure the phenomenon,' cited adverse mental health outcomes for women as part of the rationale for limiting late term abortions," Blum's team wrote.
(Excerpt) Read more at msnbc.msn.com ...
A “High Quality” study is any study that disregards ethics and places the value of human life somewhere beneath that of fried dung.
There are still some who love abortion and think it is “the best thing [they] ever did for the planet”.
On adolescents having sex:
Dr. Blum: "There is little data, however, that shows that young people who willingly engage in mutually consenting, non-abusive sexual relations are harmed by it."
On what to do if your 15 year old daughter thinks she's gay because she is attracted to girls as well as boys:
Dr. Blum: "What is critical is that your daughter feel comfortable with both attractions."
On kids losing virginity at prom:
Dr. Blum: "I don't know the data between proms and pregnancy. My advise to my daughters was: 1. if you have sex with someone make sure it is you who want it as much as him-- if not tell him to buzz off"
LMAO
One question that I haven't seen answered by proponents of the "it makes no difference whether women have abortions or not" perspective is this:
Given that an elective abortion consists of a woman choosing to murder another human being which has been an actual physical part of her, sometimes for a large part of a year; has usually been a point of great emotional attachment and has oftentimes been a product of emotional as well as physical love, how is it possible that this would NOT have a profound traumatic effect, particularly when one considers that people who take another life in other circumstances are frequently affected and oftentimes scarred for life....and this is in a situation involving people that they have no positive emotional attachment with? (such as on a battlefield or a person using lethal force defending themselves or their family from criminals).
Apparently we are being asked to believe that the far more intimate and integrated relationship of a mother and her child will produce even less emotional trauma to a mother than other sorts of life-taking events.
I’m wondering how many even bother looking at ultrasounds?
It’s simply unfathomable how many people buy into leftist lies.
In the post-abortive counseling services they say they don’t know how many times they’ve heard
“they told me it wasn’t [alive, a baby, human], but after it was over, I knew what I’d just done.”
They can choose the path of repentance or that of justification
Lots of women who had an abortion in their younger years end up having a family of their own.
The ones who do not end up having a family of their own are the ones who have multiple abortions over their lifetime ... They disgust me.
He has been chair of the Alan Guttmacher Institute [Planned Parenthood’s Research Arm]Board of Directors and was president of the Society for Adolescent Medicine.
http://www.lifenews.com/int1012.html
Study: Abortion and Miscarriage Lead to Higher Risk for Drug, Alcohol Abuse
by Steven Ertelt
LifeNews.com Editor
December 2, 2008
London, England (LifeNews.com) — A new study conducted by researchers in Australia finds women who have an abortion or a miscarriage are three times more likely to experience a drug or alcohol problem during their lifetime. The research highlights the abortion-mental health problem link found in two other studies published this week.
In this study, researchers from the University of Queensland examined 1,123 women born between 1981 and 1984.
The women were assessed at the age of 21 to find out how many pregnancies, abortions, miscarriages and births they had experienced.
The study showed that women who had experienced pregnancy loss – whether abortion or miscarriage – were at increased risk of illicit drug and alcohol use compared with women who had never been pregnant or who gave birth.
The authors published their results in the December issue of the British Journal of Psychiatry.
Unlike the other two studies that were published this week on the mental health problems women experience during an abortion, the Australian researchers found the mental health problems crop up as a result of miscarriages and not just abortions.
That prompted the authors to downplay the direct link between abortion and subsequent mental health concerns, even though their own research verified such a link exists.
They claim the link is only associated with pregnancy loss in general, whether the abortion is spontaneous or intended.
“The findings suggest that poor outcomes reported for women who had an induced abortion may be associated with pregnancy loss rather than simply the experience of abortion,” they say. “Induced abortion and miscarriage are both stressful life events that have been shown to lead to anxiety, sadness and grief and, for some women, serious depression and substance use disorders.”
The researchers suggest that women who suffer pregnancy loss may resort to drugs or alcohol as a coping mechanism and that the abuse of these substances results.
But Dr. Priscilla Coleman, a professor of Human Development and Family Studies at Bowling Green State University who led one of the teams that published a study on abortion and mental health effects last week, tells LifeNews.com the Austrialian researchers shouldn’t downplay their own results.
“Based on the methodological strengths of the Australian study, the results provide strong evidence that the risk of psychological problems associated with abortion is at least as powerful as the risk for problems post-miscarriage,” she said.
“For some of the mental health outcomes measured, abortion was actually a stronger predictor of problems than miscarriage indicating that it is not simply the loss of the pregnancy that elevates risk, but other yet to be studied mechanisms such as guilt, compromised self-esteem, anger, or relationship problems may be operative,” Dr. Coleman added.
While subsequent mental health problems for women from miscarriage isn’t new or controversial, Coleman says the Australian study backs up her own research showing abortion hurts women’s mental health.
“Researchers have known for some time that miscarriage is quite traumatizing to approximately 25% of women,” she told Lifenews.com. “Finally abortion is getting more serious recognition as a potentially traumatizing experience.”
The first of the two most recent studies was published last week and featured numerous controls and a national data set.
The Coleman-led team found induced abortions result in increased risks for a myriad of mental health problems ranging from anxiety to depression to substance abuse disorders.
The number of cases of mental health issues rose by as much as 17 percent in women having abortions compared to those who didn’t have one and the risks of each particular mental health problem rose as much as 145% for post-abortive women.
For 12 out of 15 of the mental health outcomes examined, a decision to have an abortion resulted in an elevated risk for women.
The second study, conducted by researchers at Otago University in New Zealand, found that women who had abortions had rates of mental health problems about 30% higher than other women. The conditions most associated with abortion included anxiety disorders and substance abuse disorders.
Abortions increased the risk of severe depression and anxiety by one-third.
The authors concluded that anywhere from 1.5 to 5.5 percent of all mental health disorders seen in New Zealand result from women having abortions.
Take a gander at this - ping!
In Dr. Blum's case, that statement is true.
On recommendations on sex books for kids:
"As for book, I have been out of this for a while but when my kids were little I always had Peter Mayle's books lying around so that they could pick them up. look at them and when they were older start to read them"
A look at Mayle's book:
"Where Did I Come from?" by Peter Mayle
Reading level: Ages 4-8
"this funny, down-to-earth sex - education classic describes the mechanics of reproduction in an appealing manner that young children will really connect with. Filled with cartoon-like drawings and matter-of-fact descriptions of everything from what sex feels like ( in child-friendly terms ) to how a baby is actually born, this picture book will be most helpful to parents when they're having The Talk."
“Dr. Blum’s research interests include adolescent sexuality...”
I bet they do... He looks like a sodomite pedophile.
I know three women my age who had abortions when they were young. One is a committed liberal who rationalizes the embryo was “just a bunch of cells”. She doesn’t talk about it much and now has two kids.
The other two women are serious alcoholics. One of them, end stage.
Frankly, it goes against common sense to think there isn’t a post-procedure effect on mental health in most women. There’s certainly an agenda at work in these “findings” and it isn’t in favor of life.
That picture you posted reminds us that it’s not just women who are affected by abortion.
The researchers should visit http://www.afterabortion.com/ to reconsider whether or not PAS is real or not.
"Doctor" Robert Blum, an unethical and dishonest public health functionary of the political sinkhole formerly known as the Johns Hopkins school of public health, has been enthusiastically seeking to maximize abortions for teenage girls since at least 2004. He is a political hack who would make Lysenko blush.
Twenty years ago SurgeonGeneral Koop said more research was necessary, and he was probably right at the time. Now there is more good empirical research documenting post abortion trauma today than there is for global warming.
The worst part of these lies is the harm they do to women already harmed and betrayed, by disenfranchising them from their grief. They are told their anguish is illegitimate and they should just get over it and move on. This is an obscene perversion of science, turning its mantle of respectability into a figleaf for depravity.
Yes. This guy, on the hire for Planned Parenthood(Alan Guttmacher Institute is ausbsidiary), is playing a very well-recognized and threadbare "research" game. You merely find some reason (Most anything will do) to discount any study with results you don't like. Every grad student in the last century has learned to do this in his sleep.
I know this literature and if you want to educate yourself on it I'd direct you to the Association for Interdisciplinary Research on Values and Social Change. They have a data base and archived studies and a newsletter summarizing current research, which will provide all the information you need to become competent in the area.
“Abortion not seen linked with depression”
Really. Do they measure the post-abortion mental health of the unborn baby who is killed?
The only safe abortion is an abortion that fails.
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