Regarding the last post, here’s some empirical goodness.
From the Journal of the American Medical Association:
The highly contested premises that abortion is bad for women and that women do not know their own minds garnered the support of the nation’s highest court. In fact, there is no empirical evidence for the claimed association between abortion and mental or physical harm to women. (emphasis added) Indeed, the extant evidence repudiates the Court’s claim of postabortion trauma19; having an abortion does not appear to pose greater mental or physical risks than delivering and parenting an unwanted child or giving the infant up for adoption.20 (Gostin, 2007, p.1563-1564)
References from the JAMA article:
19. Stotland NL. The myth of the abortion trauma syndrome revisited. JAMA. 1992; 268(15):2078-2079.
20. Cohen SA. Abortion and mental health: myths and realities. Guttmacher Policy Rev. 2006;9:8-16.
Oh, how I adore having a reference library of peer-reviewed literature available. Simply adore it.
Maybe I should head back over there and have a chat with this woman, article in hand and appropriately highlighted. Maybe I can share with her why I’m pro-choice. What do you think? (Yeah, that’s rhetorical, but if you have an opinion, share it anyway.)
Reference
Lawrence O. Gostin (2007). Abortion politics: Clinical freedom, trust in the judiciary, and the autonomy of women. JAMA. 2007;298(13):1562-1564 (doi:10.1001/jama.298.13.1562)
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I was at the 2000 meeting of the APA when Nancy (forgot last name) first challenged the validity of Post-Abortion Trauma Disorder. She had some fairly consistent data. But it was as heated a debate as you have ever heard. What was interesting to me as a fence-sitter on this issue is that there were as many pro-choice people arguing on both sides of the issue. You might wonder why that is?
I recommend reading Karen Eriksen’s excellent book “Beyond the DSM”. In there she takes to task such disorders as this and Battered Woman Syndrome. She (and I) believe that differentiating between these and simple PTSD makes the individual situations clinical and therefore need to be treated clinically. PTSD is the least clinical in its presentation in that it is best treated by community support rather than by therapists.
I have no doubt there are many women who have had abortions that have PTSD as a result. But there are many women who have been in car accidents, been fired from jobs, had miscarriages, bad PMS who also develop PTSD as a result.
I think that the real tragedy is not that the Pro-Life movement warns people about the possibilities of having depression or anxiety after an abortion, but that the psychological profession wants to differentiate it from the many other difficult situations in life and make it “more special”.
Oh, to be a fly on the wall at that meeting — I can imagine how loud it was. You’re absolutely right that there’s no reason to consider it a separate “type” of PTSD. The “special” status is absolutely unwarranted.
I do, however, still have a big problem with organizations such as this one I visited telling women that they will experience emotional trauma. It’s setting them up for either a) self-fulfilling prophecy, or b) guilt that they *don’t* feel bad (i.e., am I emotionally broken?). Either outcome is more negative than if they’d visited a clinic that deals in strictly facts on both sides of the choice equation.
Yes Alli, that organization cannot possibly know whether a woman will experience stress over making a particular choice. They may…but that will depend on the individual makeup of the person, not the procedure. Goodness, there are soldiers who see their entire regiment killed who don’t have PTSD. How can we guarantee anyone will have it?