Recent abortion research

Dear me! There is a lot of nonsense reported in abortion research. As far as I am concerned, abortion is an ethical issue and I have made my view of it clear elsewhere but various medical claims seem to get tangled up in it too. One claim is that women who have abortions are subsequently more depressed, which makes some intuitive sense and appears to be borne out by research. A recent piece of research has challenged that, however, and the BBC gives a reasonable summary of the controversy for the general reader. The abstract of the actual research report concerned is here and you can link from there to the full research report. I confess to not having read the article in full but it seems a rather silly article to me. They report that higher income women are more likely to abort and that such women are typically less depressed -- which rings true. But they apparently fail to control for that in assessing the effects of abortion. They really needed to compare women of SIMILAR income background (or control for income background statistically) in order to assess the effects of abortion. So I don't think we can conclude anything from their study at all.

And there is another study here which reports that women who have had abortions are more likely to become child abusers when they do eventually have children. The inference is that it is the abortion that makes the women more abusive. But isn't it the more obvious conclusion that women who are callous enough to have an abortion in the first place are also the types who would abuse children anyhow? Not all women who have abortions are callous but I don't think it's much of a stretch to assume that there are a lot more callous women among them than in the general population.

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