Among the strongest pillars upholding the continued viability of legalized abortion is the faulty conclusion (as expressed in 2008 by the pro-abortion American Psychological Association) that "There is no credible evidence that a single elective abortion of an unwanted pregnancy in and of itself causes mental health problems for adult women." So as the number of studies mount showing that many women (at least 30%) suffer from serious physical and/or mental health aftereffects from their abortion, you could be sure pro-abortionists would unload a withering barrage of criticism.
The latest round of scholarly putdowns--in this case against an important study published by Coleman et al. in 2008 in the Journal of Psychiatric Research-- was unleashed this week by researchers with obvious connections to the Abortion Establishment. Indeed it would harder to get better anti-life credentials than Julia Steinberg of the University of California, San Francisco, and Lawrence Finer of the Guttmacher Institute
[Is it an accident that their stinging critique comes on the heels of an op-ed written by Dr. Brenda Major published last month in the Washington Post, charging that "Rigorous U.S. scientific studies have not substantiated the claim that abortion, compared with its alternatives, causes an increased incidence of mental health problems"? It certainly is no coincidence that Dr. Major chaired the American Psychological Association's highly biased Task Force which produced the APA's Report on Abortion and Mental Health.]
Writing in Social Science & Medicine, Steinberg and Finer brusquely dismiss the results of the 2008 study. In a statement dripping with condescension and released with their paper, Steinberg wrote, "We were unable to reproduce the most basic tabulations of Coleman and colleagues," adding, "Moreover, their findings were logically inconsistent with other published research." For good measure, Steinberg writes, "This suggests that the results were substantially inflated" (emphasis added).
So what was it that Coleman, Coyle, Shuping, and Rue found? Let's begin with the purpose of their study--"To examine associations between abortion history and a wide range of anxiety (panic disorder, panic attacks, PTSD, Agoraphobia), mood (bipolar disorder, mania, major depression), and substance abuse disorders (alcohol and drug abuse and dependence) using a nationally representative US sample, the national comorbidity survey." [The NCS is "widely recognized as the first nationally representative survey of mental health in the United States."]
The most notable conclusion of "Induced abortion and anxiety, mood, and substance abuse disorders: Isolating the effects of abortion in the national comorbidity survey" was, "The strongest effects based on the attributable risks indicated that abortion is responsible for more than 10% of the population incidence of alcohol dependence, alcohol abuse, drug dependence, panic disorder, agoraphobia, and bipolar disorder in the population. Lower percentages were identified for 6 additional diagnoses."
Given the personal nature of Steinberg's and Finer's attack--"Antiabortion activists have relied on questionable science in their efforts to push inclusion of the concept of 'post-abortion syndrome' in both clinical practice and law"-- there is great irony in the concluding paragraph to Coleman et al.'s paper.
"The academic debate [over abortion and mental health] was fueled by socio-political agendas that impeded and at time contaminated scientific efforts," they wrote. "Recent years have however ushered in large scale, methodologically sophisticated studies…"
The Steinberg/Finer paper is 45-pages long, but the core of their critique is simple. There is no significant relationship between abortion history and substance abuse or mood and anxiety disorders once you look at "other factors, such as preexisting mental health disorders and sexual or physical violence before the abortion," as the Washington Post's Rob Stein summarized the argument. "[T]hey found that women who had had multiple abortions were more likely to have those risk factors before the abortion compared with women who had had one or no abortions."
This is the most common pro-abortion response--indeed, in some ways it is the only pro-abortion response: Women who have post-abortion difficulties came to their abortions with emotional baggage.
As Steinberg and Finer wrote, "Women likely to have negative psychological outcomes following an abortion are those least apt to cope with any stressful life event including giving birth to an unwanted pregnancy" (italics in the original). It is not a consequence OF the abortion.
In response to an inquiry, Prof. Coleman wrote back, "Despite their many claims to have conducted a 're-analysis' of our study, Steinberg and Finer have conducted a very different set of analyses. The critical distinction is in how the psychological disorders were defined. Our analyses reflected 12-month prevalence and their analyses reflected only the 30-day prevalence. Our results are quite similar to those reported by pro-choice researcher David Fergusson and many others. There are additional differences between the two sets of analyses, most notably related to the choice of potential confounding variables and the methods used to control them in the analyses."
Coleman continued, "Do these authors have plans to 'replicate' the 2010 study by Mota and colleagues published in the Canadian Journal of Psychiatry? These authors also used the National Comorbidity Survey Replication data and their results were quite consistent with ours.
"I find it hard to imagine that Steinberg and Finer believe a journal as reputable as the Journal of Psychiatric Research--edited by Alan Schatzberg, M.D., president-elect of the American Psychiatric Association--would publish an article indicating that abortion poses psychological risks to women independent of other stressors without scrutinizing the methodology carefully."
There are a number of other weaknesses.
First, Finer has worked for years for Guttmacher, the intellectual arm of the Abortion Establishment. Steinberg works at the University of California at San Francisco.
It would be difficult to exaggerate how prominent an abortion proponent UCSF has been over the decades. Carol Joffe, a prominent abortion activist who is one of the professors at UCSF's Bixby Center for Global Reproductive Health and helped put together the "Abortion Pioneers" booklet [featuring UCSF faculty], outlined the place of UCSF in the abortion movement:
"What UCSF has done, more so than any other medical institution I can think of, has been to integrate abortion into mainstream medical care," she said. "The message that this medical school gives the rest of medicine is that abortion is a normal part of women's reproductive health" (p. 17) [See http://www.nrlc.org/NewsToday/HighPowered.html].
Second, the result of the research of Coleman et al. is not an isolated outlier. It is part of a wave of research--including by self-described "pro-choicers" such as Prof. Fergusson--that has reached the same conclusion: there are serious mental health consequences associated with having an abortion.
For example, writing in the December 2008 issue of the British Journal of Psychiatry, Prof. Fergusson, John Horwood, and Dr. Joseph Boden from New Zealand's Otago University reported a 30% higher rate of mental health problems among women who had aborted. The conditions most associated with abortion included anxiety disorders and substance use disorders.
The study ("Abortion and mental health disorders: evidence from a 30-year longitudinal study") was of over 500 women born in one city, who were interviewed six times between the ages of 15 and 30.
The trio of researchers estimated that between 1.5% and 5.5% of the overall rate of mental disorders in this group of women could be accounted for by their abortions.
There were two other inter-related considerations. To begin with, "none of the other pregnancy outcomes [other than abortion] were consistently related to significantly increased risks of mental health problems."
Moreover, the evidence "clearly poses a challenge to the use of psychiatric reasons to justify abortion," Fergusson told the Daily Mail. "There is nothing in this study that would suggest that the termination of pregnancy was associated with lower risks of mental health problems than birth."
Third, in Prof. Coleman response to Dr. Major's Washington Post op-ed, she pointed out, "Over 30 studies have been published in just the last five years and they add to a body of literature comprised of hundreds of studies published in major medicine and psychology journals throughout the world." She added, "No lies, just scientifically-derived information that individual academics, several major professional organizations, and abortion providers have done their best to hide and distort in recent years."
The conclusion that abortion has a devastating aftermath for women "has been voiced by prominent researchers in Great Britain, Norway, New Zealand, Australia, South Africa, the U.S., and elsewhere," Coleman wrote. Major's "op-ed provides another illustration of the dishonesty permeating the scientific study and dissemination of information pertaining to abortion and mental health"
Contact: Dave Andrusko
Source: National Right to Life Publish Date: December 14, 2010 -- Illinois Federation for Right to Life 2600 State Street, Suite. E Alton, IL 62002 Phone: 618.466.4122 Fax: 618.466.4134 Web: www.ifrl.org E-mail: mail@ifrl.org
