Daily Archive

The anti-choice crowd, is once again basing arguments and drawing conclusions on faulty data.  Unsurprisingly though, we’ll still be seeing the talking points based on said data for quite awhile.  The Guttmacher Institute reports the following:

“Studies claiming to find a relationship between abortion and subsequent mental health problems often suffer from serious methodological limitations that invalidate their conclusions.”

Whoops!  Evidence based medicine has never been a particularly strong point with the anti-choice crowd.

“In a new analysis, Julia Steinberg, of the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) and Lawrence Finer, of the Guttmacher Institute show that the findings of a 2009 study by Priscilla Coleman et al—which claimed that women who had reported an abortion were at an increased risk of several anxiety, mood and substance use disorders, compared with women who had never had an abortion—are not replicable.”

What a surprise, the “post-abortion syndrome” meme is most likely just another tactic to bully and scare women into not exercising their bodily autonomy.

“We were unable to reproduce the most basic tabulations of Coleman and colleagues,” says Steinberg, postdoctoral fellow at UCSF. “Moreover, their findings were logically inconsistent with other published research—for example, they found higher rates of depression in the last month than other studies found during respondents’ entire lifetimes. This suggests that their results are substantially inflated.”

“Antiabortion activists have relied on questionable science in their efforts to push inclusion of the concept of ‘post-abortion syndrome’ in both clinical practice and law,” says Finer, director of domestic research at the Guttmacher Institute. “Our inability to replicate the findings of the Coleman study makes it clear that research claiming to find relationships between abortion and poor mental health indicators should be subjected to close scrutiny.”

It is important to combat the canards the anti-choicers lob towards women.  Poor science and the conclusions drawn from it must be debunked and brought to heel quickly as destructive memes such as “post-abortion syndrome” while being patently false, can do much to impinge upon the reproductive freedom of women as a whole.

See here for the study mentioned above and here for more information about the supporting evidence.