I would hate there to be a knee jerk reaction, where,
suddenly, people said we should not have abortion.
Abortion is available, it is medically appropriate and legal...
Posted on 03/14/2006 12:58:38 AM PST by Lorianne
MAXINE MCKEW: We look tonight at two very different pieces of research. There are the medical breakthroughs that can be expected from the use of stem cells taken from placenta and bone marrow. We'll look at that later in the programme. But first we consider the after effects of abortion. And in November last year, the controversial abortion pill RU-486 hit the headlines, with politicians and medical experts at loggerheads over moves to make it legal in Australia. The emotionally charged debate brought the anti-abortion and pro-choice campaigners out in force and placed abortion back on the front page for the first time in years. Now, new research has re-ignited the controversy. A New Zealand study reveals that young women who have an abortion have a higher risk of mental health problems, including depression, anxiety and drug and alcohol abuse, than women who continue with their pregnancies. Now, the study could undermine current laws in some states that allow abortion on the grounds that a woman's mental health would be adversely affected if she gave birth. Nick Grimm reports.
ANNE HADGRAFT: There is such a short period of time that a woman has to decide whether she is going to have a baby or an abortion. And often the abortion is the quick fix. But to me it wasn't a quick fix. It was years of trauma for me.
NICK GRIMM: Ann Hadgraft was already a single mother working hard to raise two daughters when unexpectedly she fell pregnant. Faced with an agonising decision about whether to keep the child she had an abortion. It was a choice she faced with apprehension and then, immediately regretted.
ANNE HADGRAFT: Secretly, you rejoice in the fact that you had a little baby growing inside you but, every day as you- as I came close to the abortion it reminded me of what I was going to do. And I think that's when it started to really chip away at my psyche. I thought this is not normal, this is not what I want to do, this does not feel right.
NICK GRIMM: Years of depression, guilt and grief for the loss of a child she never knew followed.
ANNE HADGRAFT: I went ahead with the abortion and I went in crying and I came out crying. And I guess, I guess, two years later I was still crying. I really thought I was the only one feeling this. I just thought, well, I must be insane. You know, I don't know, I've never heard that women suffer after an abortion. So, I just thought I was just going quietly insane.
NICK GRIMM: At the time, it might have come as some comfort to Ann Hadgraft to know that she wasn't alone. Now, the Christchurch School of Medicine in New Zealand has produced a new long-term study, which has found women who undergo abortion are more likely to suffer severe psychological distress. They experience more depression, anxiety, drug and alcohol abuse, even suicide.
PROFESSOR DAVID FERGUSSON, CHRISTCHURCH SCHOOL OF MEDICINE: I remain pro-choice. I am not religious. I am an atheist and a rationalist. The findings did surprise me, but the results appear to be very robust because they persist across a series of disorders and a series of ages.
NICK GRIMM: These findings further fuel the debate that's raged for decades. It's a debate that has been recently renewed. Federal Parliamentarians will soon get a conscience vote on the issue of whether the effective ban on the abortion pill RU-486 should be overturned.
SELENA EWING, SOUTHERN CROSS BIOETHICS INSTITUTE: Abortion is, in fact, a form of peri-natal loss, which involves traumatic experience and guilt and grief and often times regret that accompany those experiences.
NICK GRIMM: Selena Ewing is from the Southern Cross Bioethics Institute - an Adelaide-based think tank associated with the Catholic Church.
SELENA EWING: Whether or not a woman chooses to undergo an abortion, it is still the loss of a baby. And not just any baby, but her own baby.
DR CHRISTINE READ, FAMILY PLANNING AUSTRALIAN: I think that we forget sometimes that if abortion is removed as a choice, that women's health will be at risk and has been in the past.
NICK GRIMM: Abortion is the most common medical procedure performed on young women. The New Zealand research was conducted on more than 1,200 individuals who were tracked from birth until the age of 25. It found that among those who eventually underwent abortions, 42% suffered major depression at some stage--a third higher than those who continued with their pregnancies and double that of those who had never fallen pregnant. It was an outcome that Professor David Fergusson didn't expect.
PROF. DAVID FERGUSSON: Abortion is a traumatic life event; that is, it involves loss, it involves grief, it involves difficulties. And the trauma may, in fact, predispose people to having mental illness.
NICK GRIMM: The abortion debate incites strong emotions, especially in the United States where it's provoked angry protest, violence and even murder. Here the debate has been more measured. But, could this new research still inflame passions?
SELENA EWING: I think it certainly will. Yeah, I mean, this is Government-funded research on a large scale done by a pro-choice Professor and his results show clearly that abortion can certainly do great damage to women's mental health.
NICK GRIMM: The pro-choice lobby fears the prospect of this new research being used by the anti-abortion movement has grounds to restrict access to the procedure.
EVA COX, WOMEN'S ELECTORAL LOBBY: We've got to make sure that when women do choose to terminate a pregnancy that there is appropriate counselling before and after, if they want it; that they don't feel they're doing something nasty in the woodshed; that they don't get abused in the media for terminating pregnancies; that they don't get called selfish; that they don't feel that they've done something wrong. I expect quite a lot of this depression and anxiety could be the result of feeling you've done the wrong thing.
NICK GRIMM: Eva Cox from the Women's Electoral Lobby speaks from experience. Close to 50 years ago, she was one of the Australian women who felt they had little option but to visit backyard abortionists.
EVA COX: At that stage, there was no legal abortion. I had an illegal abortion, no counselling, no support, wasn't even allowed to take anybody with me. Despite that, I made a decision to do it, because for me, at that time, it was the right thing to do. I'm not ashamed of it. I'm not distressed by it. It was a decision I made at the time because I wanted to have a child when I was ready, and I did some years later.
NICK GRIMM: Meanwhile, some family planning experts believe the New Zealand research might be wrongly blaming abortions for mental problems more likely to be caused by factors surrounding the unwanted pregnancy itself.
DR CHRISTINE READ: I would hate there to be a knee jerk reaction, where, suddenly, people said we should not have abortion. Abortion is available, it is medically appropriate and legal and we do not want to remove that right from people.
NICK GRIMM: For her part, Ann Hadgraft says she's not anti-abortion. Even now she admits she doesn't know if she'd decide differently if she had her time over. What she does know is that she was completely unprepared for the trauma her decision was to cause.
ANN HADGRAFT: You can often make a really quick, um, a quick decision you regret for the rest of your life. Especially a lot of young women who have never had children that may go on to never have children again. They live with that regret for the rest of their lives
Selena Ewing is a nut based on this article. Aborting your baby is not "losing" your baby, come on. A miscarriage is losing your baby and all sympathy should be shown in such matters. This is yet another costly study that proves what the few sane people on earth knew from the get go. I.E. when a mother murders her own offspring, her mind judges her guilty for a long time. Sorta like the Edgar Allen Poe story of the beating heart under the floor.
There is so much education on the conception of life that a 12yr old would grasp it.
There are also so many health issues in taking birth control ( for non moral issued persons) that those folks even know responsibility even if it is not for moral issues.
or perhaps better phrases a practice of ones faith.
After all there are all kinds of objective moral issues along with subjective views.
It's America.
So to be fair we or I cannot stop free will. But I can be willing to objectively discuss some human reason in the argument of how we use DNA or Discarded Material.
Now as a Catholic Abortion unless in that 1 percent of Mother or child in a med emerg needs to be made abortion is not an option. I will not put personal history to be laughed at, treated as a joke or otherwise.
I can firmly say that I have never met a person with even half a body that wanted to be aborted.
We all have a soul and a capacity to live regardless of the shape or form of our physical self.
Now to use discarded stem cells I would not argue that to save a life.
However some wiser than me who live with severly disablde bodies find this repulsive and wound not make this moral choice due to there reasons which I trust would be the knowledge they where born with.
Would I say stop all stem cell.
No because of our free wiill and science it is on the plate of others wether they want to respond in this area....
If a baby today is going to OHSU and getting stem cell to save that baby.. I may not agree...BUT I will pray for that child and his family to have total restoration to his health no matter what choice of therapy they choose.
Yes very contradictive but not my free wiil to choose.
More education. I am not going to fix my mis spells its late and I think ya get the point. God Bless
I would hate there to be a knee jerk reaction, where,
suddenly, people said we should not have abortion.
Abortion is available, it is medically appropriate and legal...
Every woman I knew who had an abortion had some mental scars over it.
I love this part!:
"unexpectedly she fell pregnant"!
See, she was changing a light bulb in the kitchen, when she slipped off the chair, and woke up the next morning with a big belly...
Good grief!!!!
Gee...
Killing an unborn child can have negative psychological effects?
Whodathunkit?
</sarc>
That was my "choke point" too.
I caught that too!! I've heard of people falling ill, but not falling pregnant!! Anything to twist the logic to serve their purpose, I guess...
We say "get pregnant", the British and the Aussies say "fell pregnant". It's a common expression in the UK and Australia, and this is an Australian story. It's simply common slang, not "logic twisting".
Please FReepmail me if you would like to be added to, or removed from, the Pro-Life/Pro-Baby ping list...
The New Zealand research was conducted on more than 1,200 individuals who were tracked from birth until the age of 25. It found that among those who eventually underwent abortions, 42% suffered major depression at some stage--a third higher than those who continued with their pregnancies and double that of those who had never fallen pregnant.
The relevant comparison should be between women who had abortions and women who had *unplanned* pregnancies and didn't abort. It seems quite likely that young women who get pregnant unintentionally are going to have more stress and depression whether they have an abortion or carry to term. The fact that women who continued their pregnancies had higher depression rates than those who were never pregnant supports this.
Thank you for the ping Coleus.Here's a bump.
Thanks for the ping!
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