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WHAT "lifelong emotional/mental damage" are you talking about? Something you made up, heard in a dream, saw on Fox News? The Koop Report says you're wrong, as do numerous studies, such as this one:
New York Times (as printed in the San Jose Mercury 2/12/97)
Abortion does not trigger lasting emotional trauma in young women who are psychologically healthy before they become pregnant, an eight-year study of nearly 5,300 women has shown. Women who are in poor shape emotionally after an abortion are likely to have been feeling bad about their lives before terminating their pregnancies, the researchers said.
The findings, the researchers say, challenge the validity of laws that have been proposed in many states, and passed in several, mandating that women seeking abortions be informed of mental health risks.
The researchers, Dr. Nancy Felipe Russo, a psychologist at Arizona State University in Tempe, and Dr. Amy Dabul Marin, a psychologist at Phoenix College, examined the effects of race and religion on the well-being of 773 women who reported on sealed questionnaires that they had undergone abortions, and they compared the results with the emotional status of women who did not report abortions.
The women, initially 14 to 24 years old, completed questionnaires and were interviewed each year for eight years, starting in 1979. In 1980 and in 1987, the interview also included a standardized test that measures overall well-being, the Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale.
"Given the persistent assertion that abortion is associated with negative outcomes, the lack of any results in the context of such a large sample is noteworthy," the researchers wrote. The study took into account many factors that can influence a woman's emotional well-being, including education, employment, income, the presence of a spouse and the number of children.
Higher self-esteem was associated with being employed, having a higher income, having more years of education and bearing fewer children, but having had an abortion "did not make a difference," the researchers reported. And the women's religious affiliations and degree of involvement with religion did not have an independent effect on their long-term reaction to abortion. Rather, the women's psychological well-being before having abortions accounted for their mental state in the years after the abortion, the researchers said..
In considering the influence of race, the researchers again found that the women's level of self-esteem before having abortions was the strongest predictor of their well-being after an abortion.
"Although highly religious Catholic women were slightly more likely to exhibit post-abortion psychological distress than other women, this fact is explained by lower pre-existing self-esteem," the researchers wrote in the current issue of Professional Psychology: Research and Practice, a journal of the American Psychological Association.
Overall, Catholic women who attended church one or more times a week, even those who had not had abortions, had generally lower self-esteem than other women, although within the normal range, so it was hardly surprising that they also had lower self-esteem after abortions, the researchers said in interviews.
Gail Quinn, executive director of anti-abortion activities for the United States Catholic Conference, said the findings belied the experience of post-abortion counselors. She said, "While many women express `relief' following an abortion, the relief is transitory." In the long term, the experience prompts "hurting people to seek the help of post-abortion healing services," she said.
The president of the National Right to Life Committee, Dr. Wanda Franz, who earned her doctorate in developmental psychology, challenged the researchers' conclusions. She said their assessment of self-esteem "does not measure if a woman is mentally healthy," adding, "This requires a specialist who performs certain tests, not a self-assessment of how the woman feels about herself."
Adoption does, however:
J Obstet Gynecol Neonatal Nurs 1999 Jul-Aug;28(4):395-400
Postadoptive reactions of the relinquishing mother: a review.
Askren HA, Bloom KC.
Deer Valley OB/GYN, Mesa, AZ, USA.
OBJECTIVE: To review the literature addressing the process of relinquishment as it relates to the birth mother. DATA SOURCES: Computerized searches in CINAHL; Article 1 st, PsycFIRST, and SocioAbs databases, using the keywords adoption and relinquishment; and ancestral bibliographies. STUDY SELECTION: Articles from indexed journals in the English language relevant to the keywords were evaluated. No studies were located before 1978. Studies that sampled only an adolescent population were excluded. Twelve studies met the inclusion criteria and were included in the analysis. DATA EXTRACTION: Data were extracted and information was organized under the following headings: grief reaction, long-term effects, efforts to resolve, and influences on the relinquishment experience. DATA SYNTHESIS: A grief reaction unique to the relinquishing mother was identified. Although this reaction consists of features characteristic of the normal grief reaction, these features persist and often lead to chronic, unresolved grief. CONCLUSIONS: The relinquishing mother is at risk for long-term physical, psychologic, and social repercussions. Although interventions have been proposed, little is known about their effectiveness in preventing or alleviating these repercussions.
Med J Aust 1986 Feb 3;144(3):117-9 Related Articles, Links
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