Harvard Backs Judge Schreier: No Such Thing as "Abortion Trauma Syndrome"

Judge Karen Schreier got one thing right in her ruling last week on South Dakota's law putting bureaucrats and ideologues between women and their doctors. Her Honor declared that the portion of the law "requiring doctors to tell pregnant women that abortion increases the risk of suicide and suicide ideation is 'untruthful and misleading.'"

Funny: that's what I said last year about the sloppy science cited by abortion-ban proponents. And that's what the Harvard Review of Psychiatry said just this week:

In a review of 216 peer-reviewed articles on the subject of abortion and mental health, the authors of this study found that “the most well controlled studies continue to demonstrate that there is no convincing evidence that induced abortion of an unwanted pregnancy is a per se significant risk factor for psychiatric illness.” (p. 276) [cited by "Serena", "New Study Debunks 'Abortion Trauma Syndrome,'" Feminists for Choice, 2009.08.24]

But I'm sure Harvard is biased. They're just liberals who want women to kill their babies so there will be fewer kids growing up to go to college and pay tuition... oh, wait a minute....

Some more interesting facts from Feminists for Choice:

• The percentage of pregnancies termianted by induced abortion is about the same in the U.S. as worldwide, about 22%.
• In terms of physical risk, women are more likely to die from childbirth, appendectomy, or tonsillectomy.
• If women who have abortions suffer any depression, it's more likely caused by the very anti-abortion protestors professing to protect them:
  

  "[Entering] abortion clinics through a group of anti-abortion demonstrators [is] a stressor that has been shown to be associated with psychological distress . . . [And] increasing a women’s belief in her ability to deal with having an abortion decreased her likelihood of experiencing depressive symptoms following abortion. Such findings suggest that insofar as inaccurate “informed consent scripts” undermine a woman’s belief in her ability to cope after an abortion, they may contribute to her risk for depression [p. 270 of the Harvard study, emphasis Serena's]."

The whole anti-choice movement appears to be doing more harm than good. If Leslee Unruh and Steve Hickey are truly worried about women's well-being, they'll at least stop trying to bad laws based on bad science.