Johann R. Porter
(ZENIT News – International Family News / Berlin, 20.02.2023).- A new study on the effects of abortion on women’s health concludes, among other things, that there is no scientific proofs that abortion protects or improves women’s mental health.
In the course of 12 months, an interdisciplinary team of scientists examined the quality and affirmations of 13 studies quoted internationally on abortion and women‘s mental health.
The scientists concluded that a substantial proportion of international studies, carried out well methodologically, agree that abortion is associated with a greater risk of mental health problems or aggravates existing problems. For example, abortion is associated statistically with a great risk of suicide or suicide attempts, addiction, alcohol abuse and drugs, depression and anxiety. Multiple abortions increase the risk.
However, the study affirms that, due to methodological problems, there is no scientifically valid method to discard or prove in a reliable way a direct causal connection between an abortion and subsequent psychological consequences:
“One would have to assign randomly, as for example in a pharmacological study to a group of women with completely equal suppositions to an “abortion group’ or a ‘birth group’ after an unplanned/undesired pregnancy, without the woman or the doctor knowing who was assigned to each group.” The design of this random study, double-blind controlled, is completely unusable in this case and must also be rejected for ethical reasons,” explained the ethics specialist, co-author of the Susanne Kummer study.
However, the hypothesis was not able to be demonstrated scientifically that abortion has a positive effect on a woman’s psyche. The study also concluded that abortion has no therapeutic effect in the reduction of psychological risks compared with women that give birth after an undesired or unplanned pregnancy.
This questions, in part, the medical indication of abortion in Germany and Austria, among other countries. In these countries, abortion has been exempt from penalty for almost 50 years, to avoid alleged “serious damages to the mental health of a pregnant woman.” But, yes, “abortion has no positive effect on a woman’s psyche and, therefore, does not offer any factor of protection for mental health, on which the majority of serious studies agree, as the scientific basis is lacking for this legal construction,” the scientists conclude.
