New Danish Abortion Study Sets the Record Straight

So long as people are hostage to the anti-abortion lobby and zealots, they're likely to believe all manner of nonsense. One of the false memes that's been circulated is that when vulnerable women choose to abort they seriously risk their own mental health and may fall prey to serious depression or even suicide. Now, a new Danish study shows this is a load of ripe horse pockey.

The research, funded by grants from the Danish Medical Research Council and due to appear in today's New England Journal of Medicine, included 365, 550 teenagers and women who had a first time delivery or abortion between 1995 and 2007. None had a history of psychiatric problems requiring hospitalization.

Using assorted national registries, researchers were able to track the women's mental health counseling at hospitals or outpatient clinics before and after either an abortion or delivery.
Doing so, they compared the rates of mental health treatment among women before and after a first abortion. They found within the first year after an abortion, 15 per 1,000 women (or 1.5%) needed psychiatric counseling - or similar to the rate of those seeking help nine months before an abortion.

Meanwhile, the first time moms were found to have lower rates of mental problems overall, the proportion of mothers seeking mental help after giving birth was dramatically higher than the women choosing abortions. The rates of women needing mental counseling after giving birth was nearly 1.75 times greater than those needing it before. In other words, post-partum depression is much more serious an affliction than any depression resulting from having an abortion.

According to researcher Trine Munk-Olsen of Aarhus University:

"A woman should know that her risk of having a psychiatric episode is not increased after an abortion"

This is excellent news, and encouraging for those women considering abortion who are in a particular demographic risk group for serious mental problems if they have a child. According to the study, this risk group is more likely to be beset by serious economic difficulties and pre-existing emotional problems which will only be compounded on adding a child to their woes.

Lastly, let me make it clear that unlike his fundie counterparts, the atheist as a moral provisionalist, isn't absolute concerning abortion. Many of us tend to agree with the late Carl Sagan and Anne Druyan (April 22, 1990, PARADE) who showed a responsible middle ground in the abortion fracas is to bar all abortions in the last trimester - or around the time that fetal brain waves (and incipient consciousness) first manifest.

And certainly no moral provisionalist would ever countenance the monstrous atrocities perpetrated by Kermit Gosnell of Philadelphia and taking scissors to infants already born!

Once more, to refresh readers' memories: "moral provisionalism" or what I would call "ethical incrementalism" can be defined thusly (Michael Shermer, The Science of Good and Evil, p. 168):

"Provisional ethics provides a reasonable middle ground between absolute and moral relative systems. Provisional moral principles are applicable to most people, for most circumstances, for most of the time - yet flexible enough to account for the wide diversity of human behavior"

As we see, moral provisionalism follows the principle of moderation and balance first taught by Aristotle. In this sense, it steers a sensible and sane midway tack between moral absolutism and moral relativism. It is one solution, perhaps the best, to the ongoing cultural war over abortion.