DATE: August 22, 2002
FROM: Jerry Falwell
Study Reveals Abortion Harms Women's Mental Health ... and the Media Yawns
Have you heard about the new study revealing that a significant number of women suffer mental anguish following an abortion?
Well, unless you subscribe to the American Journal of Orthopsychiatry, which published the report last month, or are a fervent researcher of the Internet, you probably haven't heard of this important study.
That's because our mainstream news media recurrently declines to broadcast studies that cast a skeptical shadow on abortion.
The reason? A woman's "right" to abortion must be protected at all costs.
In fact, the media has historically refused to report on a host of medical studies that have found a genuine link between abortion and breast cancer. Studies in the U.S., Japan, Denmark, Israel and several other nations have found this link between breast cancer and abortion, with one study showing that women who had one or two abortions before a full-term pregnancy actually doubled their cancer risk. (Despite an overabundance of scientific findings, the National Cancer Institute continues to maintain that there is no established connection between breast cancer and abortion.)
If the powerful networks and newspapers won't report on the considerable and notable breast cancer link to abortion, they are certainly not going to publicize this new study finding that women frequently experience mental distress following an abortion.
The authors of this new study examined 173,000 Medi-Cal records for low-income California women, and compared the rate of psychiatric outpatient treatments for women who had abortions to those who carried their pregnancies to term. (They excluded women who had undergone previous psychiatric care a year prior to their pregnancy result.)
What the researchers found was astonishing.
Women were 63 percent more likely to receive mental health care within 90 days of an abortion compared to women who carried their babies to full term. What's more, substantially higher rates of ensuing mental health treatment continued over the entire four years of the data examined. Women who had undergone abortions experienced subsequent treatments for neurotic depression, bipolar disorder, adjustment reactions and schizophrenic disorders.
Attention ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, et al: This is a major finding!
Dr. David Reardon, one of the study's authors, is also the co-author (with Dr. Theresa Burke) of a new book titled, "Forbidden Grief: The Unspoken Pain of Abortion," which further documents how women are experiencing substantial mental dilemmas following abortion.