Pro-choice or Anti-abortion: It's Your Decision

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It is shown that many people have studied the mental effects of abortion on women. Depending on the questions asked and the information women were willing to give varied the results to a point of making it very difficult to come up with a complete conclusion. Many of the women who were surveyed had either had an abortion with their first pregnancy, after having a child, or giving birth to an unwanted pregnancy. In this paper I will discuss the history, the different effects, and reasons of the women who have abortions.

History and Background

In 1973 the Supreme Court of the United States legalized abortion in the well known case of Roe v. Wade. The public debate of the mental health risk of abortion can be traced back to 1987 when President Reagan asked the Surgeon General Koop to report on the psychological and physical effects of abortion. Mr. Koop never turned in a report instead writing the President a letter stated that the information was inadequate to support the findings of the psychological nature of abortion. Koop did not report on the physical effects of abortion because the obstetricians and gynecologist had already concluded that there was no difference in the women who had had an abortion or carried an unwanted baby to term. The Surgeon General in his letter to the President also stated that the individual cases could not allow him to come to a scientific conclusion but felt that it was clear to him that the psychological effects of abortion are very small from the public health perspective. In 1989 another task force was put together and concluded that “severe negative reactions after legal, nonrestrictive, first-trimester abortions are rare and can best be understood in the framework of coping with ...

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..., 17(4), 268-290. doi:10.1080/10673220903149119

Skuster, P. (2009). Implementing the mental health indication to help ensure access to safe abortion. Medicine And Law, 28(2), 419-432. Retrieved from EBSCOhost.

Steinberg, J. R., & Russo, N. F. (2008). Abortion and anxiety: What's the relationship?. Social Science & Medicine, 67(2), 238-252. doi:10.1016/j.socscimed.2008.03.033

Steinberg, J., & Finer, L. (2011). Examining the association of abortion history and current mental health: A reanalysis of the National Comorbidity Survey using a common-risk-factors model. Social Science & Medicine, 72(1), 72-82. Retrieved from EBSCOhost.

Warren, J. T., Harvey, S., & Henderson, J. T. (2010). Do Depression and Low Self-Esteem Follow Abortion Among Adolescents? Evidence from a National Study. Perspectives on Sexual & Reproductive Health, 42(4), 230. Retrieved from EBSCOhost.

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