Abortions found to have little effect on women’s mental health

It’s an idea that has long been used as an argument agai nst abor t i on: Terminating a pregnancy causes women to experience emotional and psycholo gic al trauma.

S o m e s t a t e s r e q u i r e women seeking abortions to be counseled that they might develop mental health problems. Now a new study, considered to be the most rigorous to look at the question in the United States, undermines that claim. Researchers followed nearly 1,000 women who sought abortions nationwide for five years and found that those who had the procedure did not experience more depression, anxiet y, low self-esteem or dissatisfaction with life than those who were denied it.

The findings come as the abortion debate intensifies in the United States, with President-elect Donald Trump promising to nominate an abortion opponent to the Supreme Court after taking office next month. The question of the effect of the procedure on women’s health, both physical and mental, has been an effective argument in recent years, used by states to enact a number of regulations and restrictions.

T h e s t u d y, p u b l i s h e d Wednesday, found psychological symptoms increased only in women who sought a b o r t i o n s b u t we r e n o t allowed to have the procedure because their pregnancies were further along than the cutoff time at the clinic they visited. But their distress was short-lived, whether they went elsewhere for an abortion or delivered the baby. About six months after being turned away from the first abortion clinic, their mental health resembled that of women who were not turned away and had abortions.

“What this study tells us about is resilience and people making the best of their circumstances and moving on,” said Katie Watson, a bioethicist at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine, who was not involved in the study. “What’s sort of a revelation is the ordinariness of it.”

The study, conducted at the University of California, San Francisco, strove to avoid methodological pitfalls of previous studies. Other studies compared women who had abortions with women who chose to give birth, two groups considered so different that many experts said little could be learned from comparing them. Other studies also failed to account for whether women had previous psychological issues, which turns out to put them at greatest risk for mental health problems after abortion.