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28 Years After Roe: Legitimate Questions Raised About Abortion’s “Safety” 1/23/2001
By Wendy Wright Washington, D.C.—On the 28th memorial of Roe v. Wade, it is past time to evaluate whether abortion benefits women. Published scientific studies have documented abortion’s harmful effects on women. Yet even this past year, the controversial approval of RU-486 revealed the FDA’s lack of concern for researching the long-term risks of the abortion drug. While the debate over abortion may continue, we can all agree we need to know what detrimental effects abortion has on women’s health. - Psychiatric Scarring
: The August 2000 issue of the Archives of General Psychiatry published a study by Dr. Brenda Major. On average, women reported no benefit from abortion, and 1.4 percent of women surveyed had all the symptoms of post-abortion syndrome (PAS). “With 40 million abortions since 1972, this would translate into 560,000 cases of PAS,” said Dr. Vincent Rue, who first proposed PAS as a variation of posttraumatic stress disorder. Twenty percent of women surveyed experienced clinical depression during the two years following abortion. - Substance Abuse
: According to a 2000 issue of the American Journal of Drug and Alcohol Abuse, women who underwent abortion were 2.7 times more likely to report a history of substance abuse than women who did not abort. Women with no prior substance abuse who aborted their first pregnancy were five times more likely to report subsequent abuse, compared to women who gave birth. - Mortality rates
: The April-June 2000 issue of the Post-Abortion Review reported on a study conducted in Finland. Dr. David Reardon discovered abortion is four times deadlier than childbirth, according to the record-based study by the statistical analysis unit of Finland’s National Research and Development Center for Welfare and Health. - The Finland study revealed women who had abortion were 252 percent more likely to die within the following year than women who carried to term. After the publication of Finland’s study, the British Medical Journal published a study of Britain’s records, revealing similar results. Researchers reported 8.1 suicide attempts per 1,000 post-abortive women, compared to 1.9 per 1,000 among women who gave birth.
- Rape and incest victims
: The newly released book Victims and Victors presents data from 192 women who became pregnant as a result of rape or incest. Of 50 rape victims who reported feelings about their abortions, 88 percent explicitly stated it was the wrong choice. Forty-three percent of the rape victims surveyed reported having abortions because of pressure from others. More than 90 percent said they would discourage other victims of sexual assault from undergoing abortion.
“Now that we know how severely abortion hurts women the medical and legal professions have a responsibility to end the exploitive practices that have damaged millions of women over the past generation. It is time that legislators and physicians demand that laws and medical treatments defend the lives, safety and rights of American women,” stated Wendy Wright, Director of Communications.
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