Junk Morals
by digby
Duh:
No high-quality study done to date can document that having an abortion causes psychological distress, or a "post-abortion syndrome," and efforts to show it does occur appear to be politically motivated, U.S. researchers said on Thursday.
A team at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore reviewed 21 studies involving more than 150,000 women and found the high-quality studies showed no significant differences in long-term mental health between women who choose to abort a pregnancy and others.
"The best research does not support the existence of a 'post-abortion syndrome' similar to post-traumatic stress disorder," Dr. Robert Blum, who led the study published in the journal Contraception, said in a statement.
"Based on the best available evidence, emotional harm should not be a factor in abortion policy. If the goal is to help women, program and policy decisions should not distort science to advance political agendas," added Vignetta Charles, a researcher and doctoral student at Johns Hopkins who worked on the study.
An estimated 1.29 million American women get elective abortions each year, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. An estimated 25 million women globally have legal abortions every year.
And they're all dizzy broads who have no idea what they're doing.
Aside from the annoyance of having to argue with mendacious zealots, there has been a real world effect of this junk science:
"The U.S. Supreme Court, while noting that 'we find no reliable data to measure the phenomenon,' cited adverse mental health outcomes for women as part of the rationale for limiting late term abortions," Blum's team wrote.
The anti-choice movement believes that abortion is morally wrong. But they also believe it is moral to lie, cheat and sometimes kill to stop it. I'm sure they would say that the latter is the lesser of evils --- they are only doing it to stop the killing of innocent children. But you have have to wonder where on the moral matrix they really fit when they are willing to create a mental illness where none exists and attempt to pin it on millions of women who made the choice to have an abortion. There is premeditated evil in that.
Update: Apparently, millions of Christian believers who don't agree that contraception and abortion are morally wrong are also waging a war on Christmas.