Thursday, December 04, 2008

Abortion not linked with depression?

A news article is floating around today claiming that there is no link between abortion and depression:
A team at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore reviewed 21 studies involving more than 150,000 women and found the high-quality studies showed no significant differences in long-term mental health between women who choose to abort a pregnancy and others.

"The best research does not support the existence of a 'post-abortion syndrome' similar to post-traumatic stress disorder," Dr. Robert Blum, who led the study published in the journal Contraception, said in a statement.
Worse, the academics behind this article simply declare that evidence to the contrary is "low quality" and "politically motivated."

How about a little transference with your baloney sandwich?

But hey, maybe these clowns are on to something. There may be less evidence of depression among post-abort women because many of these poor totured souls opt to commit suicide instead.

Suicides after pregnancy in Finland, 1987-94: register linkage study

Here's the money quote from this article:
The mean annual suicide rate was 11.3 per 100 000. The suicide rate associated with birth was significantly lower (5.9) and the rates associated with miscarriage (18.1) and induced abortion (34.7) were significantly higher than in the population.
I reckon this is one of those "low quality" studies Dr. Blum was referring to above.

Wouldn't it be nice if the medical and mental health communities got back into the business of actually helping people and not making immoral, counter-intuitive or just obviously wrong political statements?

1 comment:

Florentius said...

Thanks, Steve. I love LifeNews. Great work you're doing there.