How Abortion Harms Women’s Health Essay

Advocates of legalized abortion downplay or deny the health jeopardys associated with abortion. However, the research indicates that abortion isolates women and fag end often ground corporal and psychological suffering. tangible complications abortion can perplex both short-term and long physical complications, and can significantly affect a womans ability to render healthy future pregnancies. Physical complications include cervical lacerations and injury, uterine perforations, bleeding, release, serious infection, pain, and incomplete abortion.3 Risks of complications increase with gestational age and be strung-out upon the abortion procedure.4 Long-term physical consequences of abortion include future preterm birth and pla centa previa (improper implantation of the regulatenta) in future pregnancies.5 Premature talking to is associated with higher rates of intellectual palsy, as well as respiratory, brain, and bowel abnormalities. One recent large-scale evaluation publ ished in Pediatrics, has concluded that preterm birth is the most patronise cause of infant death in the U.S.6 Pregnancies complicated by placenta previa result in high rates of preterm birth, low birth weight, perinatal death, and maternal morbidity.7While the research of whether abortion can increase the risk of breast cancer is hotly debated, a number of scientific stu conks have indicated that induced abortion can adversely affect a womans future risk of breast cancer. Further, it has been clearly shown that induced abortion in young women causes the loss of a protective effect from a first, full-term pregnancy which when followed by a delay in child bearing, has the net effect of an increased risk for breast cancer.8 Physical complications from chemical abortion with the drug RU-486 include hemorrhage, infection, and missed ectopic pregnancy (a potentially fatal complication). Since 2000, at least 8 women have cash in ones chipsd from RU-486 due to hemorrhage and infection. 9Psychological complicationsA pro-choice research team in New Zealand, analyzing data from a 25- year period and controlling for multiple factors both pre- and post-abortion, found conclusively that abortion in young women is associated with increased risks of major depression, anxiety dis consecrate, suicidal behaviors, and substance dep poleence.10 This is the most comprehensive, long-term study ever deportmented on the issue. Other studies similarly conclude that there is substantial test of a causal association between induced abortion and both substance abuse and self-destruction.11 A come off of all over 100 long-term international studies concluded that induced abortion increases risks for mood disorders enough to provoke attempts at self harm.12 lookers have also identify a pattern of psychological tasks, known collectively as Post- Abortion Syndrome, in which women may experience depression, anxiety, anger, flashbacks, guilt, grief, denial, and relationship problems. Post-Abortion Syndrome has been identify in research as a subset of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.13 Further, studies analyzing the effects of induced abortion in adolescents have shown that those who abort reported more frequent problems sleeping, more frequent marijuana use, and an increased need for psychological counseling, when comp bed to adolescents who give birth.14 Moira Gaul is director of womens and reproductive health at the Family Research Council. She has a Master of world Health degree with an emphasis in maternal and child health.Consequences for womenThere is extensive evidence of physical, mental and activated consequences for women and their families when pregnant frets use abortion to end an inconvenient pregnancy. Major Articles and Books Concerning the Detrimental Effects of Abortion reports that in the short term (eight weeks after the abortion), there atomic number 18 numerous indicators of worked up distress 44 per cent of women who have abortions com plain of nervous disorders, 36 per cent have trouble sleeping, 31 per cent regret their decision to abort and 11 per cent have been prescribed psychotropic drugs. But it is the longer-term problems that bear more scru small. Using the most conservative estimate of post-abortion syndrome, or PAS, Dr. Brenda Major in the Archives of world(a) Psychiatry in 2000, found 1.6 per cent of women who have an abortion will suffer from PAS, a variant of post-traumatic stress disorder. In Canada, that would mean approximately 50,000 women are suffering emotionally due to their abortions. Dr. Hanna Sderbergs studies suggest the number could be closer to 60 per cent.Either way, there are more women with PAS. In Canada, the 1977 Report of the Committee on the Operation of the Abortion Law cited a five-year study in two provinces that found women who had an abortion used medical and psychiatric services much more often than others in fact, 25 per cent of women who aborted made at least one visit t o a psychiatrist compared to just 3 per cent of other women. Alcoholism and drug abuse are higher among women who have abortions than those who dont. The American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology remark in December 2002 that later alcohol and drug use during subsequent pregnancies could place newborn children at higher risk of congenital defects, low birthweight and plain death. In all, there are nearly two dozen studies that link abortion to alcohol and drug abuse. Extrapolating from research conducted by Dr. David Reardon of the Elliott Institute, as mevery as 5,000 Canadian women will begin abusing drugs and/or alcohol as a means of dealing with post-abortion stress.In 1996, the British Medical Journal reported that the suicide rate for women after an abortion was three times the general suicide rate and six times that associated with birth. This confirmed earlier studies and has been replicated since. Reardon says one reason for the toughened abortion-suicide link exists in the fact that in many ways, abortion is like suicide. A person who threatens suicide is actually crying out for help. So are women who contemplate abortion. Both are in a state of despair. Both are lonely. Both feel faced by insurmountable odds. So it is no wonder that abortion does non solve the perceived problem that of the inconvenient pregnancy.Post-abortive women are more prone to suicide, cigarette smoking, divorce, low self-esteem, sexual dysfunction, eating disorders and decreased maternal bonding with future children, resulting in child neglect or abuse. Women who have had abortions are more likely to be on public assistance, because their pathologies (promiscuity, softness to form healthy relationships, drug and alcohol abuse) are likely to light upon them single parents. In 2004, Thomas Strahan, a researcher with the intimacy of Interdisciplinary Research in the United States, found that abortion hurts women economically The repeated utilization of abortion appea rs to lead non to economic prosperity or social well-being, except to an increasing feminization of poverty. But post-abortion health problems are not merely emotional. The Elliott Institute has collated the best available data on the physical risk complications of abortion and it reports that approximately 10 per cent of women undergoing elective abortion will suffer speedy complications, of which approximately one-fifth (2 per cent) are considered flavor threatening.The most common immediate major complications include infection, excessive bleeding, embolism, ripping or perforation of the uterus, anesthesia complications, convulsions, hemorrhage, cervical injury and endotoxic shock. Minor complications include infection, bleeding, fever, second-degree burns, chronic abdominal pain, vomiting, gastro-intestinal disturbances and Rh sensitization. In the Canadian context, that means 10,000 women a year suffer complications and 2,000 face potentially liveness-threatening major com plications. Other problems manifest themselves over time. There are more than 30 studies that show a correlation between abortion and breast cancer, with women who had abortions more likely to get breast cancer. Women also face increased risk of cervical, ovarian and liver cancer. The risk for these four cancers are linked to the unnatural disruption of hormonal changes accompanying pregnancy. Untreated cervical damage increases the chances of getting cervical cancer.between 2 and 3 per cent of all abortion patients suffer perforation of the uterus this often leads to complications in subsequent pregnancies, the need for a hysterectomy and other complications, including osteoporosis. Smaller cervical lacerations can also cause problems, including cervical incompetence and subsequent labour complications. Abortion also increases the risk of placenta previa in later pregnancies, which is life-threatening to both mother (excessive bleeding) and unborn child (perinatal death), and incre ases the chance of fetal malformation. Women who have abortions are more than twice as likely to suffer subsequent labour complications, including premature delivery.Pre-term delivery increases the risk of neo-natal death and handicaps. Abortion increases the risk of ectopic pregnancies and pelvic inflammatory disease, both of which can reduce future fertility or threaten the life of the mother. Recent nation-wide data is unavailable in Canada, yet Alberta and Nova Scotia statistics indicate that repeat abortions account for well-nigh one-third of all procedures. Repeat aborters vastly increase their risk of complications and this has serious consequences for those who routinely utilize abortion as birth control it also bind ups the health care system. Perhaps most worrying is that women who have abortions are more likely to die prematurely.Reardon notes, Women who abort are approximately four times more likely to die in the following year than women who carry their pregnancies t o term and that women who carry to term are only when half as likely to die (pre-maturely) as women who were not pregnant. That includes accidental deaths, suicides and homicides, among other causes. The evidence that abortion harms women and their loved ones is overwhelming. But the harm goes beyond separates.Societal costsNo one knows for sure how much abortion costs tax feeders through the earths socialized health care system. With the exception of New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, which do not cover the entire cost of abortions committed in offstage facilities, the provinces pay for abortions in both hospitals and free-standing facilities. LifeCanada estimates that the cost just for the surgical abortion procedures is $80 million (an average of $800 multiplied by 100,000 abortions). Because of under-reporting of abortion, there is reason to believe the cost is actually greater. In 1995, the Library of parliament Research Branch said determining the cost of abortion is a co mplex and inexact process. But that is only the process. The number of follow-up visits for immediate complications is not made public (if tracked at all) and so those costs are unknowable. There is also the cost of long-term problems including fertility treatments, psychiatry and drug/alcohol treatment.There are other costs, as well that of missing students, consumers and taxpayers. The loss of 100,000 children every year means little classrooms and closed schools. In 2005, People for Education, an advocacy group, reported that the rate of school closures in Ontario has more than doubled in recent years. Between 1986 and 1995, an average of 24 Ontario schools were closed every year, but between 1999 and 2005, it was an average of 52 schools per year. Remarkably, that is despite attracting the bulk of the countrys immigrants. The fact is that Canada is an aging country in which many smaller communities and older neighbourhoods no longer have the children and teens to sustain eleme ntary and high schools. According to the Canadian Council on Learning, The steepest declines tend to occur in small, country-bred and remote school districts. It cites as an example British Columbia, where 10 school districts have seen their enrolments fall by at least 15 per cent since 2001, seven-spot of which are rural districts with smaller populations.From 1997-2005, 11 of 13 provinces and territories experienced a drop in enrolment, with six of them seeing declines of at least 10 per cent. The problem is worst in Atlantic Canada. Dr. Gerald Galway of the Faculty of Education at Memorial University in St. Johns gave a presentation to the 2009 Atlantic School Boards collection entitled, Where have all the children gone? In it, he noted that school enrolment in Atlantic Canada has fallen precipitously over the past some(prenominal) decades. While intra-provincial migration accounts for some decline in population, he mostly blames falling fertility rates. Notably, in Newfoundl and, enrolment has declined every year since 1971, except in 1984 (with the foundation of Grade 12). In fact, the school-aged population has been cut in half since 1971, from 160,000 to 80,000.Over the long term, more communities will lose their schools and policy makers will have to make difficult decisions on how to provide quality education in sparsely populated areas. There are also ramifications for public finance. Pierre Fortin, a prof of economics at the Universit du Qubec Montral, says there will be a marked deterioration of public finances because of increased health care costs and tribute liabilities as the number of seniors grows rapidly and income tax revenues decrease due to fewer workers. The result is fewer taxpayers supporting more retirees. By 2015, there will be more seniors over 65 than children under 15 it is estimated that by 2030, those over 65 will comprise 25 per cent of the population. According to the 2008 documentary The address of Abortion, the cumula tive financial loss of nearly 50 million abortions in the United States from 1973-2007 was $37 trillion in gross domestic product over the course of 35 years.Thats lost production and lost consumption due to the 50 million missing children and (later) workers. Assuming that Canada would have suffered a proportionate loss, the Canadian GDP over the past four decades would be in the neighbourhood of $4 trillion or $100 billion per year. That represents about 7 per cent of the current Canadian economy. In other words, the economic activity of a population not decimated by abortion would be equivalent to more than twice the remark package Ottawa announced in January. But after 3.2 million abortions over four decades, the missing children translate into missing economic activity.The cheapening of tender lifeThe greatest cost imposed on a society that permits abortion is the devaluing of human life and the diminishment of family life. Abortion does not stalk the nation alone but rathe r, as part of the larger culture of death. Since the legalization of abortion, contraception, gay sex and divorce in the 1960s, there has been a decline in marital stability, with fruit in sexual activity outside marriage and other sexually deviant behaviour and new assaults on human life. There are more ways to chemically eliminate newly conceived life with the abortifacient morning-after pill and abortion drugs like RU-486. With pregnancy made easily avoidable, is it surprising that courts (and later Parliament) neglected the reproductive role of marriage when they redefined the institution to include same-sex partners? In 2003, the Liberal government passed legislation opening the door to destructive embryonic stem cubicle research, cloning and other scientific experimentation that treats human life as raw material to be harvested and exploited. If inconvenient human life can be eliminated by mothers and doctors, why not create convenient lives for scientists and other researc hers?And lastly though not yet is euthanasia. Once the principle is established that inconvenient human beings can be killed, the question constitutes whos next. The answer, if the Netherlands, Belgium, Switzerland and Oregon and Washington are harbingers, is the terminally ill, the disabled and the old. Of course, weve already had Tracey Latimer and Sue Rodriguez and dozens of others whose names werent quite a national news. But these are renegades, operating outside the law. Perhaps, though, not for long. Twice in the past four years, Bloc Quebecois MP Francine Lalonde has introduced a private members bill to legalize euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide. Public opinion leans toward so-called mercy killing. The principle of eliminating inconvenient people is well established.The great corrupterAbortion corrupts every institution that promotes or even countenances it. Two examples are government (and politics) and the medical profession, although one could also look at the failure of religious leadership, the traducement of the law and so much more. As Fr. Alphonse de Valk noted in his 1979 pamphlet The Worst Law Ever, the medical profession didnt take long to become fanatical in its support for abortion. In fact, de Valk said the one group which obviously has suffered most from the 1969 law is the medical profession. In the 1960s, the Canadian Medical Association lobbied for widening the abortion law to permit abortions to save the life or protect the health of the mother (albeit with a broad understanding of mental and emotional health). By 1973, it endorsed abortion on demand. Two years later, it amended the Hippocratic Oath to remove the reference against abortifacients that had been in place for 2,500 years. In 1977, it attempted to make abortion referrals mandatory, even in cases in which doctors were morally opposed. That battle continues more than three decades later.Over the past 40 years, medical professionals have been harassed over their opposition to abortion and most medical schools screen applicants to keep pro-lifers out. Nurses have been fired, removed from certain duties and refused work because of their pro-life views, as have pharmacists. In order to make choice available to those seeking abortions, the choice of health care professionals to act according to their consciences has been compromised and even excised. Abortion has also corrupted the political process. Parliament fashioned a dishonest and untenable amendment in 1969 the therapeutic abortion committees which sanctioned the killing of the unborn. The Supreme Court threw out the minimal restrictions in 1988 and tell Parliament to write a new abortion law. The Mulroney government twice introduced legislation to address the abortion issue, but the limits were once again giant loopholes that would not have restricted abortion.Since then, abortion has been permitted within the vacuum created by the absence of a law. Politicians are scared of the issu e. Many provincial politicians refuse to answer questions about abortion, claiming it is a federal matter (which it is as a matter of criminal law, but not as health policy). Many federal politicians hide easy the false notion that the 1988 Morgentaler decision established a right to abortion. (It did not, with only one of seven justices suggesting such a right.) In the 2000 federal election, then-prime minister jean Chretien declared that Canada had social peace on the issue of abortion in reality, it was the silence of timorous politicians enforced by a rigid media censorship of any substantive debate on the topic. That censorship is widespread. Since 1995, British Columbia has had a legislated bubble zone prohibiting any pro-life speech near abortion facilities.In 1994, the Ontario government asked for and received a temporary injunction prohibiting pro-life speech near five abortion mills that injunction remains in place today. In Quebec, a limited bubble zone is in place in s everal municipalities. Such censorship has moved to university campuses, where pro-life groups are denied society status and pro-life speakers or demonstrators are prevented from making their presentations. To protect abortion from any criticism or resistance, genuine human rights, such as license of speech, freedom of association and freedom of conscience, are curbed. Such illiberal and intolerant measures are deemed necessary to defend choice.ConclusionThese are but a few of the consequences of a broad abortion licence, a quick overview of the toll of abortion. Sold to a willingly ignorant public as a matter of ain choice, abortion has had terrible consequences for society and, tragically, the women who choose abortion thinking it is a solution to their perceived problems. The enormity of the consequences, one would presume, would lead to a massive re-thinking of all-weather legal abortion. But instead of either sober reflection or a vigorous debate on abortions societal and i ndividual ramifications, there is silence. And more death. And more suffering. Forty more years and millions more deaths are too great a cost for a dearth of necessary leadership to oppose abortion. But someday, these costs and consequences will be too great to ignore. Until then, we will continue to pay in blood, treasure, womens health and a myriad of other ways.Is Abortion Safe?Psychological ConsequencesClinical research provides a growing body of scientific evidence that having an abortion can cause psychological harm to some women. Women who report negative after-effects from abortion know exactly what their problem is, observed psychologist Wanda Franz, Ph.D., in a March 1989 congressional comprehend on the impact of abortion. They report horrible nightmares of children calling them from trash cans, of body parts, and blood, Franz told the Congressional panel. When they are reminded of the abortion, Franz testified, the women re-experienced it with terrible psychological pain They feel worthless and used because they failed at the most natural of human activities the role of being a mother.106The emergence of chemical abortion methods poses a new possibly more ravage psychological threat. Unlike surgical abortions, in which women rarely see the cut up body parts, women having chemical abortions often do see the complete tiny bodies of their unborn children and are even able to distinguish the childs developing hands, eyes, etc. 107 So traumatic is this for some women that both patients and researchers involved in these studies have recommended that women unprepared for the experience of seeing their aborted children not take the drugs. 108 Long-term psychological implications of this experience have not been studied.Researchers on the after-effects of abortion have identified a pattern of psychological problems known as Post-Abortion Syndrome (PAS). Women suffering PAS may experience drug and alcohol abuse, personal relationship disorders, sexual dy sfunction, repeated abortions, communications difficulties, damaged self-esteem, and even attempt suicide. Post-Abortion Syndrome appears to be a type of pattern of denial which may last for five to ten years before emotional difficulties surface. 109Now that some clinicians have established that there is an identifiable patterns to PAS, they face a new challenge. What is still unknown is how widespread psychological problems are among women who have had abortions. A Los Angeles Times survey in 1989 found that 56% of women who had abortions felt guilty about it, and 26% mostly regretted the abortion.110 Clinicians current goal should be to conduct extensive national research studies to obtain data on the psychological after-effects of abortion.111With the growing awareness of Post Abortion Syndrome in scholarly and clinical circles, women with PAS can expect to receive a more sensitive appreciation of the suffering that they endure. Fortunately, a growing network of peer support gro ups of women who have had abortions offers assistance to women who are experiencing emotional difficulties.Many post-abortive women have also been speaking out publicly about their own abortion experiences and the healing process they went through.. Women or family members seeking culture about this particular outreach can contact American Victims of Abortion, 419 7th Street, NW, Suite 500, Washington, D.C., 20004. Physical Consequences after abortionDEATH According to the best record found study of deaths following pregnancy and abortion, a 1997 government funded study in Finland, women who abort are approximately four times more likely to die in the following year than women who carry their pregnancies to term. In addition, women who carry to term are only half as likely to die as women who were not pregnant.(16)The Finland researchers found that compared to women who carried to term, women who aborted in the year prior to their deaths were 60 percent more likely to die of natur al causes, seven times more likely to die of suicide, four times more likely to die of injuries related to to accidents, and 14 times more likely to die from homicide. Researchers believe the higher rate of deaths related to accidents and homicide may be linked to higher rates of suicidal or risk-taking behavior.(16)The leading causes of abortion related maternal deaths within a week of the surgery are hemorrhage, infection, embolism, anesthesia, and undiagnosed ectopic pregnancies. Legal abortion is reported as the fifth leading cause of maternal death in the United States, though in fact it is recognized that most abortion related deaths are not officially reported as such.(2)