Over at Evangelical Outpost Joe Carter takes the abortion establishment to task for withholding from women all the relevant potential consequences of having the procedure done. In any other area of medicine the failure to tell women what the long term effects of their having a procedure might be would be considered malpractice but not when it comes to abortion. Pro-choicers are presumably afraid that were the potential harm of abortion procedures widely disseminated not only would women be more reluctant to have them, but it would be far easier for opponents to pass legislation curtailing or banning the practice.
Carter writes:
When most people prepare to undergo elective surgery, they expect to be fully informed of the risks involved in the procedure. But what if a doctor refused to tell you that after you recovered you would be at an elevated risk of developing suicidal behavior, depression, substance abuse, anxiety, and other mental problems? What if you were told that the justification for withholding such information was that you had a "civil right" to have the surgery and that the evidence concerning risk of mental illness "didn't matter"?
Most people would be outraged if such information had been withheld from them. Yet there is one medical procedure in which the risks are paternalistically withheld from the patient. That procedure, of course, is abortion.
In one of the largest and most comprehensive longitudinal studies ever conducted on the subject, a research team led by Professor David M. Fergusson, director of the longitudinal Christchurch Health and Development Study, found that women who had abortions were significantly more likely to experience mental health problems.
"I remain pro-choice. I am not religious. I am an atheist and a rationalist," said Fergusson in an interview on Australian radio, "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. . . . 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."
Although he is still accepting of abortion, Fergusson believes women and doctors should not blindly accept the unsupported claim that abortion is generally harmless or beneficial to women. In his report, Fergusson singled out the American Psychological Association (APA) for criticism over its handling of research on women's post-abortion psychological adjustment. "It borders on scandalous that one of the most common surgical procedures performed on young women is so poorly researched and evaluated," said Fergusson. "If this were Prozac or Vioxx, reports of associated harm would be taken much more seriously with more careful research and monitoring procedures."
It's awful hard to make a credible claim that the chief concern of pro-choicers is the welfare of women when the welfare of women seems to be largely irrelevant to what women are told prior to their abortion.
