One such instance relates to a peer-reviewed article in Cureus, part of the Springer Nature group of academic publications, that explores the impact of an abortion on the woman involved.
A previous research study of the same subject did get blanket coverage by mainstream media, but this latest one has received barely a centimetre of news space, such is the state of the media, where narrative overrules the search for a greater understanding of reality.
To the details:
Three years ago, newspapers in the US and UK were full of headlines such as “Most women do not regret their abortions, study finds” (Guardian Jan 13 2020) and “The majority of women feel relief, not regret, after an abortion, study says” (CNN Jan 15 2020).
The lead author of the research cited, based on the Turnaway study, where women were recruited at abortion clinics to participate, asserted that “All the claims that negative emotions will emerge over time, a myth that has persisted for decades without any evidence to substantiate these claims, it’s clear, it’s just not true.” — Source
But the news that is being ignored is that a study just out contradicts that finding and highlights another reason why women are, in fact, harmed by abortion, and how they mostly wish to avoid killing their baby.
This study, which applied a more sophisticated methodology, found that “33% [of participating women] described their abortions as Wanted, 43% as Inconsistent [meaning, inconsistent with their own values and preferences] 14% as Unwanted and 10% as Coerced.”
That means 67 per cent of women who had undergone an abortion regretted having had one.
The details as to how this finding arose are crucial to an understanding of the character of the act of abortion. Dr Helen Watt, a Senior Research Fellow at the Bios Centre in the UK and a former Director of the Anscombe Bioethics Centre, Oxford, provides this analysis:
[Cureus study] authors David Reardon, Katherine Rafferty and Tessa Longbons are critical of Turnaway research methodology as used by the group Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health. Reardon, Rafferty and Longbons’ own survey of US women has a high participation rate: 91 percent of women in a more general survey completed an abortion survey after confirming a past abortion, so almost three times the Turnaway rate of 31 percent.
This is important, as low participation rates – common in abortion research – can skew the data. Moreover, when women are invited at the clinic to participate in a study, those with the most negative feelings at the time may be the least likely to say yes. Those who do agree to participate may drop out due to stress such studies can create – i.e. those women worst affected by abortion may not complete the study, if they ever begin it.
In contrast, the Cureus participants are an older group of women (41-45) who were not approached at the clinic to participate, but were more randomly selected, and were reflecting on their abortion at a distance. This may help account for the much higher rate of participation. As the study authors comment, “A narrow age range was chosen to eliminate the confounding effects of age while capturing the experience of women who have completed the majority of their reproductive lives.”
Cowardice of pro-choice activists
An additional finding is telling, regards the failings within both the family and within society as a whole in the care of the vulnerable:
Significantly, 60 percent of women testified that they would have continued their pregnancy if they had had more financial security and/or more emotional support from others.
These findings are condemnation of the cowardice of the pro-abortion activists who are happy to further the trendy "my right reigns supreme" mentality rather than strive to serve women and children by undertaking the hard battle to compel cultural and especially corporate elites to ensure women have personal and financial support at a crucial period of their lives.
Watt focuses much of her report on the key finding of abortion being so frequently under pressure:
This should alarm everyone. Regardless of anyone’s views on abortion, it is very concerning if women are having abortions unwillingly, particularly if this goes against their beliefs. It is no surprise that those who have unwanted abortions are particularly likely to experience detrimental effects on their emotions and mental health, as indeed the study confirmed.
Choosing an abortion – perhaps under serious pressure – does not mean that one is morally happy with the abortion at the time, much less that one will be happy with it afterwards. It is a common human experience to make choices that do not reflect one’s values, and such experiences, as in the case of abortion, can have lasting ill-effects.
In view of the stakes for the woman, the onus is clearly on society to offer and publicise pregnancy and parenting support from both the State and the voluntary sector. We must build a culture where women are empowered to resist abortion pressures, and also where partners, family members and others are more supportive of the woman’s desire to take her pregnancy to term.
Unwilling abortions chosen under pressure store up unhappiness for the woman concerned. Even those who sincerely believe they made – or tried to make – the best decision they could in their situation may still be very adversely affected.
There is, indeed, some agreement among abortion researchers that ambivalence and seeing the pregnancy as wanted or meaningful may lead to adverse effects. A study by Donald Sullins found that 14.7 percent of abortions were of wanted pregnancies, and that these abortions were particularly prone to have such effects as depression and suicide ideation.
Women’s thoughts and feelings about their abortions can be complex – unsurprisingly, given the event the woman is processing. Abortion is not a trivial matter, as many women are very aware. The “satisfaction” found in the selective Turnaway group may simply not reflect how most women feel.
Moreover, research based on the Turnaway study and published by the same researchers in the same journal as the research which garnered all the approving headlines was given far less publicity when it found that 96 per cent of women who were refused abortions did not regret having their child five years on (and the figure is 98 per cent for those who were raising the child).
International research
A further paper by some of the same researchers involved in the Cureus study, out last month in the International Journal of Women’s Health, states:
An important finding is that women who have a birth in their first pregnancy have uniformly higher rates of mental health services utilization prior to that first outcome than women who abort the first pregnancy. Following a first pregnancy abortion, however, women have significantly higher rates of mental health utilization than do women in the birth cohort.
This IJWH paper's introduction states:
There is an extensive international research literature which links induced abortion to an elevated risk for a range of mental health problems. A German case-control study by Jacob et al. concluded that abortion was positively associated with an increased risk of psychiatric conditions.1 A companion study by Jacob et al. compared groups of women with first abortion births and abortions and found abortions to be predictive of depression, adjustment disorder and somatoform disorder.2 Studies from Finland, Italy and China found an increased risk of suicide and suicidal ideation following induced abortion. Gissler et al. found a two-fold risk of suicide in spite of new guidelines implemented in Finland to monitor for post-abortion mental health.3 Lega et al studied women in ten Italian regions and found that an abortion was significantly more likely than a live birth to be followed by suicide.4 Luo et al. found that unmarried females from three Chinese cities had double the odds of suicidal ideation following abortion, while controlling for numerous demographic, behavioral and attitudinal factors.5 The dose–response relationship for women who have more than a single abortion has also been addressed in terms of mental health consequences. McCarthy et al. concluded that women with two prior abortions experienced more perceived stress and depression at 15 weeks gestation than did women with only a single prior abortion.6 A Korean study by Wie et al. concluded that women with three abortions experienced an elevated risk for suicidal ideation even while controlling for depression.7 In a US study that extensively controlled for demographic variables and other pregnancy outcomes, Sullins found that induced abortion was associated with an overall elevated risk of mental health problems, and that 8.7% of the prevalence of mental disorders was attributed to abortion.8
Go to the paper itself for access to the citations. It has open access.
Natural Law and Scientific Evidence
💢 With Natural Law being the subject of my previous post, a second serious consideration from The Cureus study's findings concerns the insight offered into the morality of abortion, given the extent of regret among the women who have done away with their baby.
Regret or other negative emotions or their absence may in fact tell us something interesting about the morality of abortion. For, if our emotions can be signs through which we are made aware of ourselves and of moral reality, then they may (albeit fallibly) tell us something about the morality of abortion also. (Source)
💢 For background on the lead author of the Cureus study, go here and here. The fact that both of the new studies produce overall results that reflect the pro-life stances of their authors does not diminish the strength of their findings. To disparage researchers purely for their findings reflects an anti-science attitude in the maligner. The study's methodology, the handling of data, and then the conclusions as linked to the data are the crucial elements in weighing research evidence.
The weaknesses mentioned above in methodology of the Turnaway study has allowed many in the scientific community to fault its findings, no matter how strenuously activists ply the study's conclusions in pushing for the loosening of political oversight over the protection of human life.
💢 See also: The Embrace of the Proabortion Turnaway Study: Wishful Thinking? or Willful Deceptions?
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