One of the forced birthers' favorite arguments for restricting women's access to reproductive health care is that abortion is bad for women's health. Some states even require doctors to tell women seeking abortions that they have an increased chance of getting breast cancer (no, they don't) and that they may suffer mental health problems later (no, they won't).
These lies have been repeated so often, sometimes as required by law, that the Supreme Court, in Gonzales v. Carhart, cited such lies as justification for upholding the heinous Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act. The Court concluded that while "no reliable data to measure the pheonmenon" existed, it was "unexceptional to conclude" that some women must certainly suffer emotional problems following an abortion. And, therefore, the government has an interest in protecting women from "severe depression and loss of esteem."
Well, here's some bad news for the forced birthers and the Supreme Court. Via the Guttmacher Institute:
An authoritative new study from researchers in Denmark, noteworthy for its exceptionally strong methodology, confirms what the best scientific evidence has long shown—that there is no causal link between abortion and mental health problems.
This new study isn't exactly news to those who pay attention to the war on women's reproductive rights. Many previous studies have debunked this often-repeated myth that having an abortion now will make you crazy later. This study, however, is "unusually rigorous."
- The sample was very large, comprising 84,620 women who had first-time, first-trimester abortions between 1995 and 2007.
- It did not rely on retrospective self-reports from women, who typically underreport abortions. Instead, it was based on complete patient medical registries, which include virtually all mental health disorders, births and abortions experienced by the Danish population: the Danish Psychiatric Central Register and the Danish National Register of Patients.
- The study has strong controls for women’s mental health prior to abortion, a critical factor that many other studies do not control for sufficiently, if at all.
This study should, at last, put an end to the argument that denying women access to reproductive health care is for their own good. It isn't. It doesn't do a damn thing to help their physical or mental health.
But if lawmakers -- and justices on the Supreme Court -- are so concerned about protecting women's health, they could direct their attention (and research and money) to the real causes of women's mental and physical health problems: poverty, violence, and, of course, denial of access to safe and affordable health care.