Posted on 01/14/2009 4:27:10 PM PST by wagglebee
Washington, DC (LifeNews.com) -- While numerous studies confirm abortions cause women subsequent mental health issues, abortion advocates downplay them so abortion isn't seed in a negative light. But one doctor who counsels women after abortions says the proof is in the actual experiences of women who regret their choice.
Dr. Linda Mintle, who counsels women after abortions, says she sees problems such as depression, anxiety and substance abuse on a regular basis in the women who have had abortions.
"Abortion is a loss," Mintle told CBN News on Wednesday.
"It's a loss of a life and so it only makes sense that even though you thought in your mind that this is what you wanted to do, it feels very out of control once they do it, so that out of control loss feeling results in anxiety," she explained.
To deal with the psychological pain of an abortion they grieve, Mintle says women often turn to drugs or alcohol and eventually develop additions to those substances.
While groups such as the American Psychological Association, which is controlled by abortion advocates, deny the abortion-mental health link, Mintle told CBN News that an honest evaluation of post-abortion women reveals it exists.
"I have to tell you that I feel there is a lot of political pressure put on researchers and therapists to not really talk about the down side of abortion because there is such a strong pro-choice lobby in this country," Mintle said.
She told the news service that women should be given information before an abortion telling them of these post-abortion mental health complications.
Mintle's comments follow the release of three new studies from researchers across the globe that confirmed an abortion-mental health issue link exists.
Dr. Priscilla Coleman, a professor of Human Development and Family Studies at Bowling Green State University, and her colleagues published a study in December in the Journal of Psychiatric Research.
The research 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.
"What is most notable in this study is that abortion contributed significant independent effects to numerous mental health problems above and beyond a variety of other traumatizing and stressful life experiences," they concluded.
Also last month, researchers at Otago University in New Zealand reported their findings in the British Journal of Psychiatry and found that women who have abortions have an increased risk of developing mental health problems.
The study 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 and as many as 5.5 percent of all mental health disorders seen in New Zealand result from women having abortions.
A third study, from a team at the University of Queensland and published in the December issue of the British Journal of Psychiatry, found women who have an abortion are three times more likely to experience a drug or alcohol problem during their lifetime.
The study showed that women who had experienced an abortion were at increased risk of illicit drug and alcohol use compared with women who had never been pregnant or who gave birth.
How do I remind you of a braindead lib? I am agreeing with you. I know full well that the reason the crime rates have dropped is because we finally wised up and started leaving the criminals in prison where they belong.
oh, terrible sentence.
Your POST reminded me of...
Thanks. I have posted it many times over the last five years and will continue to post it. I don’t post it on a lot of pro-life threads so that FReepers don’t get tired of it and see it as spam.
That's a load of garbage.
At any rate, thanks!
Go ahead and deny it like a good little atheist,
but if your rights don’t come from an unappealable, objective Creator, they come from an institution of Man, and they can thus, justly and without recourse, be taken away by an institution of Man. Not so if they are “endowed by our Creator”.
I have posted it a couple of hundred times at least. Thanks again.
Nonsense.
Not directly. Freakanomics noted that the women most likely to have an abortion are unmarried, poor and uneducated. Mothers with that background are also the most likely to have children who later end up as criminals. The racial component is correlation, not causation- a high percentage of black mothers fall into the unmarried, poor and uneducated category. If you control for these factors, you find that middle-class, educated, married black women don't have many more abortions, per capita, then their non-black counterparts.
Entirely to be expected, but not PC to openly state, eh?
It's mostly a poverty, illegitimacy and lack of education issue, rather than a question of race. Of course, there is a high correlation between race and these other factors.
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